Starting the Countdown: May 1995–May 1996

Monday 1 May

Lavender has accepted the post of patron of the AIDS trust fund. With Sister Maureen and others they are searching for possible members of the Board of Trustees and a suitable building for a hospice itself. The hospital authority says they will have difficulty in supplying the hospice with appropriate services until prejudice in the community has lessened, but Lavender is pretty confident that in due course they will give as much support as they can with money and a building.

Tuesday 2 May

One or two of my senior colleagues are worried about how we will handle Legco after the elections in September. They are fussed about issues like private members’ bills, but I am not too bothered. We simply have to make it clear that the present rules regarding the financial implications of these bills will still stand. A private bill involving financial costs has to be approved by the execution. I will be able to veto a bill if I don’t like it, but I don’t believe this will happen too frequently. I reckon that an elected Legco will behave responsibly and won’t try to put in place all sorts of things before 1997 just to provoke Beijing.

I saw Sérgio Vieira de Mello from the UNHCR [UN High Commissioner for Refugees], who is trying hard to help us with a more rapid return of Vietnamese migrants to their own country. He is exceptionally impressive – very frank, not remotely servile, and makes good sense. How wonderful it would be if every UN representative was like this.

Wednesday 3 May

The Legco debate on the CFA. Handling the issue in the legislature has not been made easier by a leak in the newspapers this morning setting out the Chinese position on the CFA in all its gory detail. We didn’t really get very much of a steer about the proposed legislation from the discussion; the motion passed simply states that the court should be set up in accordance with the Basic Law and the Joint Declaration. There is no reference to the secret 1991 agreement which caused so much anxiety – not least because of China’s efforts, which continue, only to allow one non-local judge on the court. Doubtless, in its present mood London will think that the 1991 deal was fine. My only conclusion is that we will get a real caning if we don’t try to legislate at all, from lawyers, politicians and business leaders. Much of the trouble in the weeks and months ahead will be the usual favourite Hong Kong sport of trying to find ladders for people to climb down. I don’t want our own to be too steep.

Thursday 4 May

I had a quiet dinner with Geoffrey Howe, who is staying for a night. He was a bit preoccupied with the dreadful Scott Inquiry, but we talked mostly about Britain and Europe. He wants me to go back to UK politics and thinks that it would be fun particularly to be part of a Ken Clarke team after the election. I point out that it might not be so much fun if we got a complete drubbing in the election (which seems quite likely) or if Michael Portillo is party leader. He noted rather wryly that life isn’t too bad, now that he has a bit of money. He has been a very considerable public servant; it’s a pity we don’t agree about Hong Kong and China.

The local election results in England have been awful. I’m not sure whether this will affect the internal dynamics of the government. I rather doubt it. So I don’t think that it will make very much difference to the debate, such as it is, about Hong Kong, China and trade pipedreams. A good thing about Michael Heseltine is that he fights clean and doesn’t allow differences about policy to affect his personal relations. I wish I could say the same about all the officials who stir him up.

The NCNA are inviting senior Hong Kong officials to go and talk to them about the future. This does cause a certain amount of unease. I don’t think that I can or should stop anybody having these sorts of discussions in Hong Kong. But I can certainly stop them being summoned from Hong Kong for meetings elsewhere. More trouble at the weekend from Ted Heath and an interview in the Sunday morning Post. But does he really matter anyway any more? It’s sad that he has spent so long in such a mega sulk. He could have run NATO or the European Commission or had another international job. What is the point of a life devoted to rotting off other people, particularly, of course, Margaret Thatcher?

Lu Ping is going to be here for 7½ days on his forthcoming visit but doesn’t appear to have any time to see Anson, who has offered lunch or a meeting. She is being asked to go to Beijing if she wants to see him. The dates he has offered happen to be ones when she is likely to be in London both for a business meeting and on leave. Prime ministers, foreign ministers and finance ministers all round the world have time to meet Anson when she is in their countries, but the director of the HKMAO [Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office] is here for almost 180 hours and over 20 meals and can’t find time. Meantime, Beijing endlessly criticizes us for not sharing enough information with them about how Hong Kong is run. All crazy. What a bunch to have to deal with.

We spent some time discussing a Legco question from Emily Lau on Britain’s responsibilities for Hong Kong after 1997. We have produced a robust draft and the FCO are spending their time trying to strip all the legal and moral toughness out of it. I don’t think they can have any idea of the impact of this on our officials, who seem at one and the same time to be both flabbergasted and not terribly surprised about this further evidence of Britain’s lack of interest and concern. I can imagine the conversations without too much difficulty. ‘We really mustn’t dig ourselves in too deep on Hong Kong because, after all, once we’ve got 1997 out of the way we will be wanting to restore our relationship with China.’ I’m not sure that China will actually give a toss about us after 1997.

I gave a lunch for the Hong Kong–United States Economic Cooperation Committee. Paul Volcker is the head of the American team. When Willie Purves was chairman of the Hong Kong side, Volcker apparently told him he really must understand that in the USA the sort of remarks that Purves made about China’s human rights record simply wouldn’t play. Some of the Americans are clearly sceptical about all the assurances they are getting in Hong Kong that everything is going to be all right. I have to be rather careful what I say since C. H. Tung is sitting next to me. I am told the Americans have been advised by Tung and others that it may be a good idea not to mention the rule of law when they go on to Beijing, and they shouldn’t lobby on the CFA since this might be counter-productive!

Tuesday 9 May

Francis Cornish doesn’t think that Hezza’s visit to China later this month is attracting very high-quality business leaders. Francis is also extremely sceptical about this sort of trip as well as the likelihood of it producing any really big business breakthroughs. There are the usual problems in organizing details with the Chinese, including getting permission for the aircraft to fly around China. The Beijing embassy has written to our JLG team questioning their judgement that the Chinese don’t want to make progress on the CFA and taking up their cause on issues like post-verdict remedial mechanisms. After all, they say, perhaps the Chinese are worried – I’m not making this up – about recent miscarriages of justice in Britain and don’t want the same thing to happen in the SAR after 1997. I’m not sure that the Chinese would know a miscarriage of justice if one got up and hit them over the head with a rolled Whitehall umbrella.

Meetings about the container terminals conclude that, while we must carry on with the port development, we must at the same time open it up to greater competition. We must also retain our reputation for clean public procurement. It does look as though we will complete work on the airport in 1997 but won’t be able to open it until the first part of 1999 because of the delays caused by China’s negotiating tactics. This is probably more or less what people are expecting. So we will do the work and Beijing will get to open the result.

Edward has found a wonderful photograph of John Major and myself being clapped outside No. 10 by the Prime Minister’s staff after the election of 1992. Percy Cradock is in the front of the picture helping to lead the applause. Now that must find a place in a book some time. Perhaps he was silent clapping.

Douglas has sent a good letter round colleagues endorsing the way we want to handle the CFA, taking the legislation through a couple of weeks after Hezza’s visit, and asking for replies by the week of 22nd May, that is, after Michael returns from his triumph. Len Appleyard has sent the inevitable telegram promising support if ministers take this courageous decision to go ahead with the bill, but predicting serious trouble in these circumstances and noting that this will come shortly after so many businessmen have been trooped around China.

Friday 12 May

High points of my 51st birthday: Kate called in the morning; I opened a Methodist shelter for Filipinos at Stanley; I’m given a wonderful birthday tea by the private office with a Black Forest gateau and the gift of a splendid wooden Chinese God; and the Courtaulds and Cheung Man Yee take us out to dinner with other friends to a Shanghainese restaurant. On top of that Alastair phoned up from London having already sent a very funny telegram full of appropriate Chinese poems. Hezza’s armada has set sail – or at least taken off.

Discussing the functional constituencies, we found that registration is already beyond 900,000. We still have about a fortnight to go to push the tally higher. I had an interesting discussion with Pam Youde. She is being pressed to see Lu Ping while she is in Hong Kong. She was advised by the FCO that this might be embarrassing and she wants to get my view. Why did she check? She says that she remembers that in Teddy’s day he very often disagreed with the FCO and she just wanted to check what the score was now. I was not surprised to learn from her how difficult relations were between Teddy and Cradock.

Lydia came to see me and confirmed that Swire’s are getting increasingly nervous about the state-owned China National Aviation Corporation and the pledges they have had in the past from Chinese officials about Cathay’s position in Hong Kong. People outside are bound to compare the strategies towards Beijing of Jardine’s and Swire’s. The first has to some extent repositioned itself and been slagged off; the second has tried to cosy up to the Chinese and doesn’t seem to be doing any better.

The press have got quite excited because it turns out that one of the senior members of Lu’s Preliminary Working Committee has a dodgy past with criminal convictions before he became a company director which were not notified to the stock exchange. ‘Are we surprised?’ asks Martin Dinham and goes on to question whether we should stop counting the dodgy pasts of PWC members on the fingers of one hand.

Monday 15 May

The unemployment figures have risen to 3%. There will be pressure on us to do something about the Labour Importation Scheme; in other words, stop people coming in to work here. There has been a poll today in which 75% of those asked think that Lu Ping should have met Anson.

I did a long interview for the London Spectator. The journalist used to live here. His former bank colleagues don’t like what I’m doing but his tailor is a supporter. I guess the tailor at least will still be living here after the handover.

Friday 19 May

A drink with the charming and chatty Duchess of York and then out to dinner to celebrate Jannie Dinham’s birthday. Before those I had a perfectly awful meeting with Sir Alan Walters, Margaret Thatcher’s former economic adviser, who was just as bad as I thought he would be. He has been here to talk at a seminar organized by the PWC on Hong Kong’s role as an international financial centre. I was bombarded by vain stuff about how he himself is responsible for the link between the Hong Kong and the US dollars and a disgraceful suggestion (he is going off to visit Argentina) that we should pay the Falklanders to vote for the Argentinian embrace. Margaret would love that! I was told that within half an hour of seeing me, he denounced me and democracy in his speech. Why do I bother?

Saturday 20 May

We are trying to clear some of the migrants from one part of the camp at Whitehead, a difficult exercise. We keep in touch with events from Fanling. There have already been quite a few police casualties. Later I visited police and correctional services staff, as well as a few fire brigade members, who took part with the others in the operations. An independent monitors’ report has commended the police and their colleagues for their restraint. This seems all the more admirable when I see some of the weapons used by the migrants.

We had two telegrams today which raised eyebrows. First, there was Len Appleyard’s description of Michael Heseltine’s visit to China. It reads a bit like a spoof. ‘Outstanding … Brilliant leadership … Billions of business to be done … The only problem is Hong Kong.’ Inevitably we also get a telegram from London about a conversation between the Foreign Secretary and Michael over the weekend. Hezza has really dug in over the CFA. He wants to send a message to Li Peng, with whom he thinks he has established a great relationship. (Presumably they did not discuss Tiananmen.) He wants to put off any question of legislating on the CFA for the rest of the present session of the legislature. It’s worse than we were anticipating, or at least as bad as it could have been. Bob Peirce and I had a talk, and I sketched out a few notes, then Bob produced a brilliant telegram setting out our case pretty comprehensively in his customarily pellucid prose. This is a British diplomat’s drafting at its best.

Sunday 21 May

Another Len Appleyard telegram has arrived in which, while being about as unhelpful as he possibly could be, he includes the ridiculous proposition that our policy should be neither to confront China nor to back down. I am not sure what this means – if anything at all. Well, actually, I am sure it’s white flag time. Oh for the days of Robin McLaren.

During a barbecue that Lavender and I gave for her tennis team and their spouses, we hear that the Prime Minister’s meeting with senior colleagues has endorsed our timing for the CFA bill, so that it can be considered before the end of this legislative session. But presumably in order to save Michael Heseltine’s face, there is to be a message from the Prime Minister to Li Peng. It’s a small price but a barking idea. It will ensure that the Chinese reaction is noisier than it otherwise would be, but I guess we had to make some sort of payment for being able to go ahead. Ken Clarke apparently let the Treasury know before the meeting that he was backing us and this must have been pretty decisive. Anyway, the meeting appears to have blocked off any subsequent room for manoeuvring away from the decision to introduce the bill. What is so annoying about the whole saga is that it has put a strain on our relations with London, raised the political price for me of failure, and made it very difficult to fight an issue as hard as this again. I don’t like having a fight with somebody I like as much as Hezza, though I don’t any longer give a monkey’s for having arguments with some of the FCO crew back home. They won’t get any easier as we get closer to the election.

Thursday 25 May

Len Appleyard telephoned with his congratulations. Martin spoke to him – I hope briskly. Len is now into his ‘tin hat’ routine: we must all fight together rather than fight each other, etc. After what has gone on so far it is all rather ludicrous. We know perfectly well that he and Hezza were planning how to dish us while they were staying in a luxury hotel in Guangzhou. This is where they cooked up the idea of a message to Li Peng about which Len is now having second thoughts. The hotel is presumably bugged by the Chinese security forces (who probably own it), so unless they are totally incompetent the Chinese will know exactly what the split is on the British side.

I talked to Martin and Bob about some of the problems that we’ve been having both from London and Beijing since Peter Ricketts and Robin McLaren left. We plainly have to go on fighting our corner, but maybe we shouldn’t take too tragic a view of it all. First, governors of Hong Kong have invariably been regarded as tedious distractions from improving Sino-UK relations by the chaps at home: just think about how unpopular Murray MacLehose was in London. Second, again it’s inevitable that a lot of officials will be looking ever more enthusiastically to the end of our colonial responsibilities in Hong Kong and not having to bother too much about what is left over from the almost extinct British Empire. Third, they have never thought very much about the impact of their behaviour on the morale and attitudes of those who work for us so diligently and often bravely in Hong Kong. Fourth, the caricature of the Foreign Office, namely that a few of its officials regard diplomacy as, principally, getting on well with foreigners, is not always unfair. George Schultz used to say this as well about the State Department. Finally, so long as we have ministers on our side – and we have been extremely lucky in that regard – we can and should go on standing up for ourselves knowing that we will usually, if we go on long enough, win the day. Ever more scraps will doubtless take place as we get closer to handover day. One country, two systems under the present custodianship of one country, two lots of interests.

There is an energy-sapping row because a senior official in the recreation and culture branch in the absence of his boss has suggested to Legco that we are intending to drop our proposed bill on broadcasting because it may annoy the Chinese. It’s complete rubbish, but the more he tries to explain away what he said, the deeper the hole becomes. I suppose it will add to the suggestion that we are putting off difficult decisions just to please the Chinese. But I don’t think that is going to be the idea over the coming weeks as the CFA argument comes to a head. There’s a rather chilling reminder of the influence that the Triads still have in Hong Kong. In a trial in which the boss is accused of violence against some of his former employees, he gets off scot-free as they all develop amnesia when called into the witness box.

Friday 26 May

Lavender has left for London and France. She is going to see Kate (returning from her studies in Mexico) and Laura, and is then off to sign the final contract for Monbretal and to organize the builders, decorators and plumber.

We are having a tough time in the JLG over the financing of the airport and the railway to it. The Chinese have really convinced themselves that our financial arguments are unsound. They are presumably being put up to this by the Bank of China.

Tuesday 30 May

A really serious discussion has started in the JLG on the CFA. The important point for us is to have the court set up with its judicial integrity in place. We can’t possibly allow Hong Kong’s Supreme Court, with much the same jurisdictional role as the Privy Council, to be subject to second-guessing or having its remit constrained by a definition of ‘acts of state’ which allows Beijing to add whatever they want to the explicit reference to foreign affairs and defence contained in the BL.

Alan Paul, the outstandingly able and dryly witty FCO official who normally leads for us on this issue in the JLG, has had to go back to Britain for the funeral of his brother, so for this final stage – at least I hope it’s final – of the CFA talks our team is being led by Richard Hoare, my former private secretary who is now the Hong Kong head of administration. In the first session the Chinese have been stressing two things. First, whatever happens, there will be a CFA on 1st July 1997. They want it to be set up with our participation, which indeed they will encourage. Second, there are lots of hints and nudges that if we will only accept some of what they are saying, they will give in on the court being debarred from adjudicating on the constitutionality of laws and on the post-verdict remedial mechanism: in other words they will no longer insist that the executive should be able to change judicial conclusions after they’ve been made. They will also accept having more judges from outside on the court for individual cases.

After a discussion with members of the Ad Hoc group, and with their total agreement, I authorized Richard to say at dinner with the Chinese side that for us there is no question of face involved in setting up the court. What we are concerned about is the nature of the court that is actually established. We prefer a decent court set up in 1997 on agreed lines to no agreement and a row. Since we can keep the Privy Council’s role going until 1997, the point about a judicial vacuum is less important to us than the argument about the jurisdiction of the court. It will be interesting to see whether we have smoked out their real problems: first removing the ability to second-guess judgments, and second limiting the ability of judges appointed from abroad to try particular cases. In the evening, I had dinner with two FT journalists who were sceptical about how much people in Hong Kong want another fight, even over the CFA. I suspect they are right, though it won’t come out like that if we actually do a deal which the Chinese can accept and which will therefore be regarded with suspicion by lawyers in Hong Kong and by the Democrats. At least on this, the business community seems to be onside and I think may have been putting pressure on Beijing, insofar as anyone can.

Wednesday 31 May

We agreed with Richard Hoare five points that we can put to China on the CFA. First, we are prepared to amend the bill we put to Legco to take account of some presentational points proposed by the HKMAO Preliminary Working Committee. Second, the Chinese must drop the demands for a post-remedial mechanism and on the court being barred from any jurisdiction on the constitutionality of laws. Third, while the legislation should go ahead now, and preparations for the court should be made, it won’t actually sit before 1 July 1997. Fourth, they will support our bill. Fifth, we’re happy that the preparatory team for the future Chief Executive and SAR government should work with us in arranging the establishment of the court. We worked out a precise form of words to put to London and the embassy in Beijing. It seems clear that they are both now in practice letting us conduct the negotiations much as we like. London officials are presumably sighing with relief that there is at least a chance of a settlement and no row. Even if this does not happen, and there is no settlement along these lines, we will look decent when everything comes out into the open.

Thursday 1 June

After Exco, which endorsed our approach to the CFA talks, I did a Legco session mostly on registration in the functional constituencies. We have done pretty well, registering about a million people in all, which is 14 times as many as voted in functional constituencies last time round. In the new constituencies that we have created there are getting on for 900,000, and I think this number is likely to climb over the years. For the moment we are likely to be criticized by some because it isn’t even higher and by others for such a disgraceful increase in the number of people who have the right to vote for Legco. We have managed to get rid of most of the worst examples of rotten borough constituencies too.

Richard Hoare tells us that his Chinese interlocutors have taken delivery of our proposals and have left us dangling in the usual way. They tell us that they will give their views in due course. We have gone through all this pain because the 1991 agreement was made in secret and then, partly as a result, torn up by Legco.

Tuesday 6 June

A summit on employment. I was expecting almost anything, including a union walkout. There was a crowd of trade unionists outside shouting, and a bit of a political show inside. I was presented with a bitter melon by one trade union representative for the benefit of the cameras. I reminded some of the press afterwards that this fruit was one of Chairman Mao’s favourites. When the meeting actually got underway, it went well. There was a lot of agreement about labour market issues with the exception of the importation scheme, and everyone was fairly constructive. Naturally, there was the usual posturing afterwards and there are allegations from the unions that this has just been a political show. But I think we’ve accomplished the first objective, which is to get people talking in a helpful way.

Alan Paul is now back from London and leading our team again alongside Richard Hoare. They have established an expert group with the Chinese to look at the details of the CFA bill. We seem to be some way from agreement, though it appears clear that the Chinese do want to deal. They are already hinting to Len Appleyard in Beijing that Qian will now be able to make his visit to London. They will of course still try to get everything they can from us and will battle right down to the wire, and indeed even beyond it.

Wednesday 7 June

I went to open the Joseph Conrad Library at the French International School. I began with a few words in French and after the first sentence everyone present burst into thunderous applause, as if it is amazing that an Englishman can manage even a few words in their language. I then surprised them again by saying quite a lot more in French. But I had to think of it all rather carefully beforehand.

Hard pounding continues in the JLG on the CFA. Francis Cornish says (perfectly reasonably) that there will be a lot of dashed hopes if we don’t get an agreement, though he doesn’t think that this result would be calamitous. On the other hand, there will be a huge sigh of relief if agreement is possible.

Friday 9 June

Lavender got back last night and had to come with me almost straight away to a charity dinner in the ballroom for the Liver Foundation. I was dragged in and out of the dinner by our CFA negotiating team. There are a couple of points left outstanding which are still dividing the two sides. In my judgement, if we conceded both of them it would make it more difficult to sell the deal. Our team are keen to settle because they think the Chinese might kick over the traces on other matters if we dig in. My own hunch, however, is that if we hold firm the Chinese will back down because they plainly want a deal and know that we will simply go ahead with the bill in a couple of days if there is no agreement. We send our slightly reluctant team back into battle and at 11.45pm we got the news that we have won the points that we wanted. The text is all we needed.

The agreement says, first, that we will accept the presentational points suggested by the PWC; they are fairly technical. Second, the Chinese will drop their arguments to limit the CFA’s jurisdiction on the constitutionality of laws and they will also drop the idea that alongside the CFA there should be a post-remedial verdict mechanism. Third, we accept that how matters can be raised in the court should be as it was set out in the Basic Law. Fourth, the Chinese assure us that if Legco deals with the bill this summer, they will be positive about it. Finally, the Chief Executive designate and his team will be responsible in partnership with us for setting up the court in 1996–7 on the basis of the legislation that we pass now. It will actually start work on 1 July that year.

This morning we began with a an Exco meeting at which the agreement was enthusiastically endorsed. I saw the Chief Justice just afterwards, who is supportive. Allen Lee is all over the place and is being got at by some of his colleagues on heaven knows what grounds; mainly I suspect the fact that we are putting it forward at all. Martin Lee came in to GH to denounce what I am proposing, saying the whole thing is a sell-out. He is particularly critical of the fact that we have used the language from the Basic Law about acts of state, though he was of course on the committee which drafted this mini constitution. He’s obviously quite pleased that he’s got a stick to beat us with but says that he hopes that our disagreement won’t affect our relationship.

At a Legco question and answer session on the agreement, none of the questions was particularly difficult. The Democrats were hostile and others sat on the fence. Even Emily Lau said to me (as I’m leaving the chamber) that, while she doesn’t support what we have done, she thinks I did well in dealing with questions. In talking to the press, we seem to do better with the locals than with the foreign media, who are in British kowtow mode. I don’t think I’ve ever worked with so many officials who could do the sort of sophisticated briefing that is required as well as these ones do it. Kerry of course conducts the band. Nelson Polsby once said to him flatteringly, ‘It is an impossible job which you and Chris make seem possible.’

Saturday 10 June

The local press is pretty good; the foreign press is pretty bad. There is a very critical editorial in The Times. I had to go in the evening to a football match between an Italian team and a hopeless local side. I avoid yawning too much. The crowd was very friendly. Over the weekend, local business organizations are coming out with supportive statements (makes a change) and so are the local consulates-general.

Monday 12 June

Lydia Dunn, eyes demurely cast down, told me that she has been offered a post on the Swire’s parent board and would be leaving Hong Kong at the end of the year. She thought she should step down from Exco at the end of July and wishes to announce it this week. She is going for 10 days in London after that to do whatever she does in London apart from the season. I thought this would happen sooner or later and that she would simply glide away from Hong Kong like a beautiful swan without anybody really noticing, but it has all come rather sooner than I was anticipating. It will make a few waves (though not many more than swans normally cause) but she is a skilful operator and can certainly ride any swell. I’m sure she will also manage to explain away some of the things she has said in the past about the future of Hong Kong.

We have all been out and about doing interviews and talking to the press, radio and television. Martin Lee has been particularly busy with the clichés. Apparently, Percy Cradock is now living in Government House cohabiting with Neville Chamberlain. One of the senior members of the embassy staff in Beijing stops off in Hong Kong on his way back from five weeks’ leave and tells some of our FCO officials that he and other members of the embassy are very disturbed about the way that their ambassador has been behaving. Ever since ministers took a decision in January on the CFA, he has been manoeuvring to overturn it. They don’t much care for this. Apparently when this chap was in London he spoke to the personnel department about the appalling relations between Beijing and Hong Kong and London, but was told that no one knew what he was talking about. Who knows? Maybe true, maybe not. What does it matter now? Anyway, the pro-Hezza faction back home are all saying that the deal is a result of his thickening up of relations with Beijing. So there you go.

Tuesday 13 June

We hosted a concert by the Academy for Performing Arts and gave a dinner afterwards for some of the sponsors. Anna Sohmen tells me that her family is locating its shipping business to Singapore, not of course because of 1997 but because of the larger size of the Singapore port. Ho ho.

One of Hong Kong Telecom’s main external advisers has talked to me about the mess the company is in. It provides getting on for 70% of the profits of Cable and Wireless but its management here is now in hopeless hands. David Young, who is chairman of the parent company, seems to think that the answer to the relationship with China is to have meetings with prime ministers and the like. In order to head their operations in China, they have appointed the son of a senior Beijing official. The problem is that, while he has a title and lots of money, he is – to say the least – not very highly regarded by his own staff.

Thursday 15 June

Our CFA bill was introduced in Legco today.

I’ve spoken to Sarah Hogg on the phone about a book she is writing on the 1992 election and today I talked with the Prime Minister. Like Sarah, he is pretty low. He had a very bad meeting with fifty or so Euro rebels this week. I’ve written to him pointing out that there’s a nasty precedent about allowing a small minority in the party to tell a leader in effect that unless they get their own way they will kick over the stall.

At a meeting with Peregrine Worsthorne, who is going into China with Clare Hollingworth, he was obviously rather sceptical about democracy in Hong Kong, or anywhere else for that matter. He sounded very enthusiastic about China. We had a perfectly civil conversation and he was very courteous afterwards in a patronizing sort of way – he said that I have come on a lot since I left Britain and turned into a statesman. So there!

Lydia has done a press conference announcing her departure. I think she will get away with it. It was a class act which I would love to have seen her deploy more frequently. Hidden agendas are the subject of much speculation, but, as Lavender points out, she is not criticized for abandoning ship. People wish her well. Lavender notes wisely that it really is a refugee community with a refugee culture.

Friday 16 June

The usual Queen’s official birthday reception. Despite grey clouds we were able to hold the Beating the Retreat outdoors. In two years time it will be our retreat.

Over the weekend I’ve been reflecting further on Lydia while recovering from a golf lesson at Fanling. She said some loyal things at her press conference which made it more difficult for the press to write that she and I had fallen out. I guess that her view on loyalty is inevitably different from mine, given what she has experienced from the colonial power in the past. She has never actually been disloyal; on the other hand, she doesn’t exactly put her head over the parapet with any enthusiasm. But how much could we legitimately expect her to do? She was let down by Britain before and particularly after 1989, when there was a consensus on electoral arrangements which she had helped to push through. Like others in Hong Kong, she has found herself marching up the hill with the Union Jack in her hand only to find that the British are not there when she gets to the top. I don’t think that history will be at all harsh on her or others like her. I’m not sure how significant a political player she has actually been, but she has operated as a skilled establishment colonial public servant. She has done quite well out of Britain and I guess you could say the reverse is probably even more true.

We got agreement at Exco, after a slightly difficult discussion, to go ahead with scrapping regulations under the emergency powers ordinance. These are the sort of rules that we would never use ourselves nowadays but which might be conveniently to hand in any crackdown after the handover.

Alice finished her exams today. Big sigh of relief.

Lavender had a pretty depressing visit to the psychiatric hospital at Castle Peak, which we have had squarely in our sights for improvement. The high point of her visit was to meet a man who she said looked perfectly normal but announced that he was King George V. My dad used to visit a similar hospital in West London with the St Vincent de Paul Society every Sunday afternoon before benediction and spent a lot of time talking to someone who thought he was Napoleon. Dad used to say that he regularly advised him not to march on Moscow.

Steve Vines has said to Edward that he is very grateful to us because now all he has to do is to touch the keys on his word processor and all the old stories about kowtow pop up again. Martin Lee is over the top and all over the place on the CFA. The Canadian Commissioner says that he is in his martyr mode, but it is losing him some support among the mainstream foreign observers. Nevertheless, he will still get the first paragraph in any 200- or 300-word article on Hong Kong.

Friday 23 June

We heard yesterday that John Major has resigned as leader of the Conservative Party and is intending to put himself up for re-election in early July. Today Douglas Hurd has announced that he is resigning: he is a man whom I admire as much as anyone, for his intellectual depth, wisdom and generosity. With all this going on, our scrapping of the emergency powers regulations has hardly got any attention, surprising when you think how much thought and effort went into what we are doing, though I suppose there would have been a big fuss if we hadn’t done it. There will also be no coverage of the fact that Standard and Poor’s have just given us a very good rating, higher than the one for China – one country, two ratings.

Saturday 24 June

I spoke to the Prime Minister and he seems quite buoyant believing that he has done the right thing for himself, the party and the country. The fact that John Redwood is evidently going to stand against him in the leadership contest may have contributed to this.

Tuesday 27 June

We gave a dinner for Legco which went surprisingly well given that some of them are intending to support a vote of no confidence in our CFA deal. Martin Lee made a rather heavy joke about at least having confidence in Lavender’s cooking. Lavender got through the evening heroically. She is on crutches because she has just twisted her ankle walking down the stairs with the dogs. She reckons that on our large table she and I are the only parents having a child educated in Hong Kong! The intelligence during the evening is that everyone we talk to seems to think we will get the CFA bill through Legco. In some cases they seem to be a bit sheepish about voting against it. Anson has a trip to Beijing next weekend, organized by her uncle, the distinguished doctor Harry Fang. All the arrangements seem to have gone ahead very smoothly.

Thursday 29 June

Another meeting with Henry Kissinger, who is rather waspish about the American administration’s handling of its relations with China. He told me wryly about his recent visit to Windsor to get his honorary knighthood from the Queen: he was driven from there to Ascot in her open carriage, which he says must finally have destroyed any reputation he had left with the New York Jewish liberal community.

I visited some of the blackspots in the New Territories (container dump on agricultural land, bad housing) and was shown what our officials are doing to deal with them.

Monday 3 July

Good news this week: it looks as though we may get an agreement on airport funding and acceptance of our legislation on the Mutual Provident Fund. The negotiations on the financial support agreements for the airport authority and the mass transit railway company have suddenly moved rather rapidly towards a settlement that was well above our bottom line. The newspapers are full of the airport deal, which will cheer people up in the community. They may even make some of our people in London and Beijing recognize that standing firm against tough Chinese bullying from defensible positions has much to be said for it.

I talked to the Prime Minister on the phone, who seemed dangerously elegiac. I said to him (and to Tristan and others to whom I’ve spoken) that he mustn’t set himself an impossible target in terms of the number of votes he secures. The fact is that no other candidate would get as many votes as he is going to get. I also spoke to Anson, who saw Lu Ping today. Remarkably he came out of hospital to see her. She thought he looked rather drawn. She didn’t go into detail about the conversation but he was positive about wanting to work with her. She is going to see Qian Qichen tomorrow. Our conversation was discreetly phrased; we both assumed that it is being intercepted. We agreed that she will have to tell Exco about her meeting on Tuesday morning and the media afterwards. The wonder is that no one has got on to it yet. We went out to dinner with the Maryknoll fathers and sisters at Stanley. Very nice people and I’m clearly able to count on the aggregate of their prayers! The only bad news is that Alice went off to France this weekend. We are going to miss her lively company and that of her friends around the house for the next few weeks.

I told some senior colleagues this morning that Anson has been in Beijing for the weekend, to general enthusiasm. It will add to the feeling around the place that at last we are making a bit of progress – though inevitably there will also be shouts of betrayal just because the atmosphere has improved. But that has not happened because of any white flags on our side of Hong Kong harbour. During dinner with the French consul-general, I was interrupted by the news that the story of Anson’s visit seems to have leaked from London. She is understandably furious. What morons. This will confirm Anson’s views about not being able to trust British officials in London or Beijing. At least I think she still trusts me and my team here, including the really great guys on the JLG who have notched up some great successes recently.

Tuesday 4 July

Anson came in early and gave a few of us a readout of her visit to Beijing. She was treated with great courtesy and got all the reassuring messages she could have asked for on the civil service from Lu and Qian. The latter apparently said that it was important that the people running Hong Kong should love China but even more important that they should love Hong Kong. No real business was done but the atmospherics were good; telephone numbers were exchanged but no invective. They were obviously looking for a way out over the container terminal development. Qian said that it was unrealistic for us to expect that all the transitional business would have been completed by 1997. Anson went on to tell Exco what had happened, who were delighted. Then she told the media. There was a bit of stuff about secret deals and the Governor being sidelined, but on the whole it all went well. It is ironic that the Chinese, who only recently were still refusing to talk directly to Hong Kong government officials on the grounds that this would represent a manifestation of the three-legged stool, are now saying that they want to talk to Hong Kong government officials but not to me. I remind people that I’ve been saying for a couple of years that as we get closer to 1997, I would try to take more of a back seat and delegate more to local officials. I don’t think people necessarily understand that if you have been a Cabinet minister who loses his seat, you develop a fairly thick skin about what others believe to be political slights. If this bit of the adventure all ends with Beijing thinking even half as well of Anson as I do it will be a triumph.

I did long interviews with Steve Vines for the Independent and Jonathan Dimbleby for his documentary. They are both quite sharp about kowtows. Jonathan in particular banged on about acts of state; he has bought Martin Lee’s line. I forbear to mention that the last time he was here, Margaret Ng told him that we shouldn’t make such a fuss about the CFA but leave it until 1997.

Wednesday 5 July

We got the result of the Conservative leadership ballot yesterday. John has won by a clear majority. As the Maryknoll fathers reminded me the other evening, there is a God in heaven. I hope John will now be decisive about the reshuffle and get rid of one or two unreliable and disloyal jerks. He has made Michael Heseltine Deputy Lord of Hosts and Malcolm Rifkind Foreign Secretary, which he will do very well. There’s a slight tilt to the centre-left. Alastair Goodlad is to become – oh thankless task – Chief Whip. I will miss him a lot. He is much more than a safe and steady pair of hands, but that alone counts for quite a lot.

We had a discussion in Ad Hoc about the Vietnamese boat people. If we are to keep up the pace of returns there have to be some mandatory repatriation flights. These are not much fun to do, to put it mildly; there’s another planned for August. I’ve agreed that we should have independent monitors for these flights, so I don’t think that there is any more reason to give the press the right to film everything that goes on at the airport. There are no human rights arguments for it but there is a lot of downside. The cameras encourage some of the Vietnamese to behave badly, and the more this happens the more the media love it, and the more we get pressed to stop the flights.

Thursday 6 July

A long private meeting with Anson this morning. She is really fed up with the Foreign Office. She was particularly cross that when she went to see Douglas at the beginning of June, she wasn’t able to see him on her own. We had asked that this should happen, but Christopher Hum sat in on the meeting. Francis Cornish has an idea about which I’m not at all enthusiastic, to get some of the leading figures in the Hong Kong British business world to come together to raise funds for the handover ceremony in 1997. I’m told that Charles Mackay, Willie Purves and Adrian Swire have already turned down the handsome offer of leading such an effort – they are pretty terrified of being seen to be British. I guess that in Mackay’s case the very poor Inchcape results may have been an added complication. Anyway, I think we should go ahead without any of that and the British government will have to pay. Later in the day Malcolm Rifkind phones me after Cabinet, which was very civil of him, to ask who should be minister of state now that Alastair has moved to be Chief Whip. The choice is between Jeremy Hanley, who used to be my PPS, and Nicholas Bonsor. I go straight away for Hanley, though I know that he will get a drubbing in the Hong Kong press, who are cruel to junior ministers. He also tells very good jokes.

I afterwards did a speech day at the Sacred Heart Canossian College, where Anson went to school. There are lots of lovely nuns and nice jolly girls. All the sixth formers go to university. In the evening we went out for our third anniversary dinner with about 40 past and present members of the private office. We have been so lucky to have had so many excellent people around us.

The local papers predictably have a go at Jeremy Hanley, who apparently is not Aristotle or Winston Churchill. It is suggested that his appointment is a demotion from having been party chairman and therefore an insult to Hong Kong. Sometimes I think that we suffer from too much intellectual Womble journalism, but that’s the price of freedom – even when you think that some of the people writing the stuff need therapy. It hasn’t been very different at home with the treatment dished out to the Prime Minister.

Michael Heseltine has invited me to lunch when I’m back in London for a couple of days in mid-July. He’s a proper person. We disagree about China but that doesn’t mean that we have to stop being friends. Meanwhile, the careers of David Wright and Christopher Hum are taking them to new posts – Wright as ambassador to Tokyo and Hum as ambassador to Warsaw. Congratulations all round, particularly from all my colleagues in Hong Kong.

Saturday 8 July

We’ve come over to Macau as guests of the Vieiras and are having a very good time with competitive tennis and some nice Portuguese meals. Coming to Macau always feels like taking a trip to an odd bit of Europe for a cheerful weekend. The Governor is obviously all too aware that he has two more years in Macau even after we leave in 1997; he has already been there for five years, and is wondering what more he can do. He obviously regards dealing with the Chinese as an increasingly frustrating occupation. He is particularly concerned about signs of growing lawlessness in Macau and also that the civil and security services are clearing things more and more with the NCNA. His frustrations in dealing with the Chinese are made greater because he has a much weaker hand to play than me. I hope he doesn’t go before we do. Lavender is departing on 11 July for France and the summer. She will have to miss Louise and Steve’s wedding. But I’m going to be able to be there and the reception is being held in the ballroom. When I go off as well, the dogs are going up to Fanling to stay with Ah Fong; after all the spoiling they get in GH they are to be put on a strict diet.

Tuesday 11 July

We had a no-confidence debate in Legco on the CFA agreement. Both Anson and Jeremy Mathews^fn1 make strong speeches. We win the vote by just over 2 to 1 – 35 to 17. Another corner turned.

Thursday 13 July

A Q and A session in Legco, but unfortunately Martin Lee isn’t there so misses some of my better barbs about the best way of standing up for the rule of law. His colleagues look a bit shifty. But now I will have to rebuild bridges that I didn’t actually knock down myself. Peter Stothard from The Times came for a talk. I’ve always liked him since he used to edit some of my opinion pieces for the newspaper when I was a young backbencher. He has an original line which begins with flattery: he says that Hong Kong has one of Britain’s best politicians, but since I am not sufficiently appreciated here I might as well go home and help sort things out there, leaving a year early so that Anson can take over. I explained the importance of trying to preserve Anson for the future and of my role as a sort of buffer or lightning conductor for the Hong Kong administration and an expert team of senior civil servants. I’ve arranged for him to go and see Anson, which I hope will put him off this particular argument. I then gave a farewell dinner for Hamish and Fiona McLeod. He has been an excellent Financial Secretary. He never makes a fuss but just gets things done very competently. They are returning to Edinburgh but not, I hope, retiring.

Friday 14 July

In Ad Hoc we discuss our review of legislation regarding freedom of the press. We are a bit worried about the localization of the Official Secrets Act. Our conclusion is that we will have to set out in public the rudiments of what we are proposing to discuss with the Chinese. If we don’t do this, we will put ourselves in the impossible position of refusing to talk about the localization of the Official Secrets Act on the grounds that it’s too secret. We also need to talk about the future relationship between a more democratic Legco and the appointed Exco. I’m not in favour of changing the membership of Exco in any significant way, and I’m also rather wary about the argument we should change the Letters Patent, bringing the situation regarding private members’ bills into line with what it would be under the Basic Law. I think we should wait and see whether we have the existing authority to choke off unwelcome private members’ bills if they start to appear incontinently.

Gerald Segal tells me that after he wrote a piece for the International Herald Tribune saying that Beijing’s authority over its regions was fracturing, he was visited by a couple of diplomats from the Chinese embassy in London to say that either he should write a retraction of the article or he would have his visa to enter China permanently withdrawn. The Chinese try to terrorize scholars with this sort of threat. The sad thing is that most people seem to go along with it. Segal believes that the rest of the world should take a firmer line with the Chinese over their bullying tactics. Needless to say, I agree with him.

Anson has offered Zhou Nan dinner in order to give him some face. The pretence was that he had helped organize her visit to Beijing. In truth, he probably didn’t know anything at all about it and would have tried to block it if he had.

Saturday 15 July

I am in London for a short visit. It all seems much calmer than on recent trips. The Prime Minister thinks that the outcome of the leadership contest has given him at least a chance of pulling the party into some sort of re-electable shape. The prospect of returning to British politics if we lose is not exactly enticing. There are one or two safe constituencies, one in particular as a result of boundary reorganization, which are being dangled in front of me.

Monday 17 July

A very enjoyable lunch with Michael Heseltine. He said that he hoped there weren’t any hard feelings between us because of our disagreements on the CFA. There are not: I said and meant that a disagreement about China was not going to disrupt a friendship, based in part on my admiration for his views on so many subjects, from the role of government in the economy and in promoting social harmony to the country’s relationship with Europe. He is thinking of going to China again, or rather he is being pressed to go. He thinks that his meeting with the awful Li Peng was a breakthrough. I didn’t try to put him off this view and it may conceivably be that he did help a bit to convince the Chinese that we were not out to ruin Hong Kong or to leave it behind when we left as an explosive device aimed at the CCP. We agree that it will be very difficult for the government to get re-elected if most of the press is against us. He has tried to win Rothermere round, but apparently the proprietor and his Mail editors do not think that John Major is a winner. Scarcely surprisingly, Hezza is making a lot of waves in Whitehall.

Malcolm Rifkind was very well briefed. I went through everything with him. I argued that we were at a turning point. Relations with China have improved largely because, in the spring, the Chinese seemed to have come to the conclusion that unless they were more cooperative with us, it would damage their own interests since we were only two years away from the transition. They were also probably rather concerned about hearts and minds, and the momentum for an improvement had been increased by their dispute with America over Taiwan. Secondly, I ran a largely Chinese administration and people are inevitably looking to the future. They want me to act as a buffer, taking the tough decisions in relation to China, which would be more difficult for them to take. Third, I said that having been assaulted for being confrontational for the last three years, we were doubtless going to spend the next couple being criticized for kowtowing. There was something inherently unappetizing about what we were bound by history to do – hand back a free society to China – and inevitably public opinion will focus on this and on our inability to give complete reassurance about the future. We discussed the importance of trying to ensure that some solid achievements come out of his meeting with Qian in the autumn. I’m going to write to Lu Ping about cooperating with the Preparatory Committee and in due course the Chief Executive’s team designate.

Tuesday 18 July

Jeremy Hanley and his officials were also helpful and I subsequently had a long session with Sir John Coles, the permanent undersecretary. I told him that Anson now trusted Foreign Office diplomats in London about as much as she trusted the NCNA. He understands the point and is coming to Hong Kong in September. He wants to talk to Anson personally. He said that he has just talked to Len Appleyard and raised his failure to retain the confidence of even FCO officials in Hong Kong. When I saw Len in London he said that he hoped that now that the wretched CFA business was behind us, we could work successfully together.

David Steel^fn2 was helpful and said that he thought that Martin Lee, whom he had been trying to calm down, had been wrong in his criticisms of the CFA. Robin Cook^fn3 noted, presumably jokingly, that after Hong Kong, and assuming that Labour won the election, he would have to send me off as a special envoy to Bosnia. The friends that I’m seeing all seem in better shape, not least William Waldegrave, who is fighting back against Scott with his own legal submission. Edward has picked up a lot of gossip, not least about attempts over the last year to get me to return to the government.

Wednesday 19 July

Lavender, Laura and two of Nicholas Dimbleby’s sons (Nicholas is a sculptor) set off for France at the crack of dawn with an estate car full of bits and pieces. It’s a heroic mission to start to knock our house into shape.

Thursday 20 July

Back to Hong Kong. I’ve got Martin Dinham to write an article for the South China Morning Post in effect responding to a piece I read on the plane in Le Monde saying that after 1997 the rule of law in Hong Kong would be flattened by the use that China would make of its definition of acts of state. This is really damaging and is a direct consequence of the exaggerated criticisms by Martin Lee. He has not been very sensible about this and there are these international consequences.

Friday 21 July

My main meetings were about the prospects for the Provident Fund and CFA bills and the best way forward on freedom of speech and the Official Secrets Act. Exco are very nervous about saying much about official secrets at the moment lest we have to back off in the face of a strong Chinese reaction. In fact their response so far to our proposals has been mild; perhaps they will get noisier when they have a chance of studying them. I also had a follow-up meeting to my visit in March to Tuen Mun. I didn’t tell anyone in advance and when I got there discovered all sorts of problems and less sign of progress than I would have hoped for. I fired off a couple of rockets. At the weekend Steve and Louise get married: a good-looking and charming couple.

This week has inevitably been dominated by the Legco debates and votes on the CFA and the Mandatory Provident Fund. Hamish and Lydia attend their last Exco and we had a discussion about Sino-US relations, which appear to be in free fall, particularly since the PLA have just been firing missiles – only tests, of course – north of Taiwan. In the debate on the CFA on Wednesday we won hands down by 38 to 17. The closest vote was a majority of seven on the composition of the court. The local press will be pretty positive about this, but not the foreign press. The following day we got the MPF bill almost unscathed through Legco. I had lunch with John Tsang and Martin Dinham before packing for my holiday. John has fitted in brilliantly – clever, amusing and a good manager. He hits it off very well with Martin and Edward; come to think of it everyone here does.

I would certainly have settled for going off on holiday with agreement to set up the CFA and with a new pension scheme under our belt.

Saturday 26 August

Monbretal is one of the best things we’ve ever done. Lavender and her gang have done an amazing job in getting it into shape and preparing it for some quite big building works and decoration next year. It is as Lavender says a perfect holiday home, not grand but immensely comfortable, big enough to fill with family and friends, and in a beautiful part of the country with a lovely garden that I can start to have fun with. Thinking about it will cheer me up on the grey days.

Sunday 27 August

I came back to Hong Kong ahead of Lavender but with Alice, who is wearing with her usual modesty her battle ribbons from GCSEs – five A stars and four A’s. I am now on active parental duty. With Alice, this is no burden. I sometimes think that she largely runs the household herself through the exercise of huge charm. Her friends from school come in and out all the time. We have one or two serious conversations. We disagree about Conrad, whom I always think is a bit clunky.

Monday 28 August

The main reason for coming back early is that this is the week we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Hong Kong. It’s also the week when the Hong Kong Volunteers Regiment – the so-called 99 – are disbanded. There’s a real feel of the beginning of the end, which I guess will exist for the whole week. There was a commemorative parade at the Cenotaph this morning. The weather is filthy with very high winds but at least it didn’t rain. There was a fun band and much clapping of the veterans as they marched around the square in front of the Hong Kong Club next to the Cenotaph. Then a lunch for the British Legion and the veterans at which I had to speak; Edward had written a good draft. After this an evening reception for the British Legion and a dinner with the CBF and an admiral. We were supposed to be having dinner on a nuclear submarine but the choppy water in Hong Kong has obliged it to leave early because it kept on breaking its moorings.

After dinner I sat around in my dressing room having rather black thoughts about the next 18 months. Liberals worldwide will give us a kicking for doing the job which history has given us. On the other side, there will be all sorts of parades of pretty dubious Chinese patriotism. And we’ve got horrid issues like visas to get right. It can’t be fun all the time.

Tuesday 29 August

There is pressure from some of my senior officials to change the Royal Instructions and Letters Patent to bring them into line with the position on private members’ bills in Legco after 1997. The worry is that that after the elections legislators will cut loose irresponsibly. I just don’t think that it’s very good politics to change the constitution immediately after elections for whose integrity we fought so hard. I would much prefer to use my existing powers if necessary. If we still have arguments then we should focus them on the particular issue of the legislation concerned. Anyway, we have to sort this out without a division opening up.

Anson has made another visit to China while I’ve been away to see her grandfather’s grave in Anhui. He was a heroic figure and she has also seen an official film about him. She doesn’t have to prove her patriotism to anyone, not least to any of the United Front activists in Hong Kong. The president of the US Heritage Foundation, passing through the city, told me that we have once again won the poll for the freest economy in the world.

Thursday 31 August

There was more military stuff on Wednesday at Stonecutters: a tattoo by the Volunteers and Beating the Retreat. We will be beating it a lot. As the pipes wail there was a bright moon on a lovely evening. But today we had a nearly-typhoon. We managed to avoid a direct hit but there was still a number 8 signal and the usual havoc with the roads shut. Lavender managed to get home after a bumpy landing. Len Appleyard phoned in the afternoon. When Anson was in Beijing she talked about civil service matters to officials there. Len seems to want a bit of the action on this, but, of course, I’m going to leave it all in Anson’s hands.

A US Congressman called Chris Smith came in for a meeting. He is one of the authors of a bit of legislation in the House of Representatives which is likely to cause us a lot of difficulty with Vietnamese migrants. Smith is urging the rescreening of all migrants – in effect checking that they’re all wholly voluntary and political not economic refugees – which will delay the return programme since they all think that if this happens they will be given the right to go to America or elsewhere as political refugees. This is not of course going to be the outcome, as the US has made clear. It’s going to lead to a lot of bitter disappointment for the refugees and more trouble for us. But I don’t think we will get through to him; he has that driven look in his eye.

Saturday 2 September

Jeremy Hanley and his wife have arrived. We all went to the Gallipoli lines for the disbandment parade of the Royal Hong Kong Regiment, more beginnings of the same end.

Monday 4 September

We discussed with Jeremy the visit that Qian will make shortly to London. I hope that we can get some sort of deal on the cooperation we could reasonably have with the Preparatory Committee, and how to arrange contacts with senior civil servants. It would be a nice bonus if we can also get an agreement on the container terminal.

In the afternoon there is yet another meeting about how to deal with private members’ bills in the new Legco. I repeat that I want us to examine the real scale of the problem. We obviously need to strengthen our position about the sort of financial hurdles which any private member’s bill would need to clear. At present the Attorney General’s chambers seem to take a very relaxed view about what may or may not constitute the financial effect of a piece of private member’s legislation. I pointed out that if we try to make some big constitutional change in Legco about this issue there will be a lot of opposition. It is not only on livelihood issues that we can then expect a majority against us. I made it pretty clear where I stand but remain determined as far as possible to avoid a gap opening up between GH and the rest of the administration on this.

The president of the Chelsea Conservative Association phoned. Do I want to put my name forward for the new Chelsea seat? I went through all the familiar arguments once again. He seems disappointed but resigned.

Tuesday 5 September

After Exco with Jeremy and a light agenda (though one or two members argue that China is making a rod for its own back by still refusing to speak to the Democrats), Jeremy and I went off for a district visit to Shatin, which was as cheerful and enthusiastic as ever. Jeremy survived his first encounter at the post-visit press stand-up with the Hong Kong media. We gave a farewell lunch to my ADC, Mike Ellis, who is off to Bristol University before becoming a solicitor as soon as he can manage it. He has been very competent and next in line is his friend Lance Brown.

Thursday 7 September

We are starting to have discussions about the handover ceremony, which gives me pause for thought – not long to go – and are also preparing my next big Legco speech. This evening one of my doctors came for a talk not about my heart but about his pension. He told me that he is going to resign this year. Why won’t he stay on after he is 55? Because, he replied, he doesn’t trust the Chinese to pay his pension. I tried hard, but there’s a limit to how much reassurance I can give.

Saturday 9 September

It’s the traditional Chinese mid-autumn festival. We are at Fanling, where I’m reading and reviewing a book by Andrew Marr. Jonathan Dimbleby came for supper. He detects a growing mood among liberal opinion in Hong Kong. It goes something like this. All the argument about democracy in Hong Kong really didn’t matter. It was only an attempt by the British to look good before we quit. We are not really bothered about anything else. We’ve now given up and are trying to get out without any further rows with China. The only thing that really interests us is our commercial prospects.

Short memories. For myself, I shan’t forget our first two years here or indeed the arguments that preceded my arrival. As for the real thing, there’s been a lot of campaigning for two months for the Legco elections next weekend. There are noisy public meetings and street canvassing, and while we have a restful weekend there are lots of people knocking on doors all across the city. Lavender points out that there is hardly an inch of spare space along the roads that is not covered with photographs of candidates trying with more or less success to look appealing to the public.

Monday 11 September

Our wedding anniversary: 24 years. Lavender and I agree we are as happy as if not happier than ever. Corny, but also true. Before going out to a celebration dinner, I had one of my regular meetings with the Police Commissioner. There has been a small increase in crime in the first half of the year, but the Commissioner seems to think that this is easing off. Like me, his real worry is the chance, which admittedly seems remote, of a breakdown in social order over the next couple of years. After the recent typhoon, the road at Tuen Mun was blocked, producing chaos in the New Territories. The police handled it and their relations with angry local residents extremely well. The Commissioner thinks this is indicative of high police morale.

Tuesday 12 September

John Coles has come for a short visit and accompanied me to Exco. He asked about the relationship between China’s recent row over Taiwan and Hong Kong and got a variety of responses. C. H. Tung made the point very strongly that if Taiwan were to move towards independence, there is no doubt that China would fight. But I don’t myself think that Taiwan would dream at the moment of testing China like this. As far as Beijing is concerned, Taiwan is an issue which it has to make a fuss about from time to time in order to appeal to nationalist sentiment.

I visited the registration and electoral office, where a hugely complicated operation is being handled with competence and enthusiasm, and attended part of a briefing for 1600 civil servants who will be helping as election agents at polling stations next Sunday. I’m told that 14,000 civil servants volunteered for this sort of work. A long talk with John Coles, mostly about visas and how we handle the next 18 months. I think the main reason he is here is to repair bridges with Anson and other senior Hong Kong civil servants.

I think senior officials are now resigned to the fact that I don’t want to make any constitutional changes to cope with private members’ legislation in the new Legco: they just want to be assured that I will take a firm line with any bills that we don’t like. We also talk about how to handle the election results at the weekend.

Sunday 17 September

Lavender and I went to a polling station near Fanling. Everything seems to be going very smoothly. It’s great for morale to see the people of Hong Kong exercising their freedom to vote for their own legislature, I hope not for the last time. They have been promised by China that democratization will continue steadily. We shall see.

I went down to the central count after supper. 1.4 million people have voted, 170,000 more than ever before. The vote in the functional constituencies has totalled well over 400,000. The exit polls suggest that the Democrats have done much better than expected.

Monday 18 September

I woke up to the first results of the elections, which confirm what the exit polls were saying last night. Very good results for the Democrats. The leading pro-Beijing figures have all been beaten. So has Elsie Tu. I doubt whether any of them were helped by a statement from the NCNA yesterday morning saying that it didn’t matter what happened in the elections since this elected Legco would be wound up in 1997. The allies of the Democrats have done well also, for example Margaret Ng has won the legal constituency against the odds. Other independent-minded candidates who support openness and democratic accountability have also won, such as Christine Loh, Emily Lau and the former Secretary for Health and Welfare, Elizabeth Wong. Some people are suggesting that Beijing will have to take account of the results. I wouldn’t bet on it, though of course it would be the sensible thing for them to do – sensible in every political sense.

Tuesday 19 September

After singing happy birthday to Lavender, I had breakfast with Winston Lord. We agreed first that I mustn’t allow a gap to open up between the Hong Kong government and Legco, and second that the Democrats should be encouraged to behave responsibly and cooperate with the government when it’s in everyone’s interest to do so. No one will be helped if they cut loose and appear to be acting in a reckless and populist way. He says that Washington is keen to put its relationship with China back on a more even keel but that this is not going to be easy because of uncertainty in Beijing about the direction of policy and next year’s elections in the US. I gave Lavender a birthday dinner with friends on the Lady Maurine.

Wednesday 20 September

I’ve started to talk to Legco parties and winning candidates, telling Martin Lee that he should be making as many contacts as possible with business and with civil servants. I am making clear to members of the administration that we need to realize the necessity of boxing much more cleverly with Legco than we sometimes have in the past. In the evening we gave a farewell dinner for James Blake and his wife. James has been responsible for the government works programme. He is the last expatriate senior official left in the administration, apart from the Attorney General, Jeremy Mathews. It has been a remarkably swift and comprehensive process of localization, and the competence of government in Hong Kong has not suffered an iota. His departure is a significant day for Hong Kong.

Thursday 21 September

Len Appleyard has come for 24 hours and joined Crispin Tickell (who used to be my permanent secretary when I was aid minister) for dinner and, in Len’s case, a bonding session with me. As diplomats, Len and Crispin are about as different as it is possible to be. I doubt whether they like one another much. One of Crispin’s greatest successes was to advise Margaret Thatcher about climate change. He is quite grand but very good company and, that rare thing, an English intellectual.

Friday 22 September

A big and dangerous occasion tonight. We agreed some time ago to do an Any Questions? BBC broadcast from the ballroom in GH with a panel consisting of Emily Lau, Jonathan Mirsky, David Tang and myself. There was of course a live and very lively audience. I didn’t realize when I was doing it what a storm I’m about to create. I had rehearsed beforehand with Edward and Bob Peirce what I should say if asked about the holders of dependent-territory passports being given right of abode in the UK. I told Edward and Bob what I thought and they didn’t tell me to belt up. How could I? And what was it that I thought?

I said I believed that the formal policy of the Hong Kong government was as it had been ever since the 1990 British Nationalities (Hong Kong) Act was passed after the killings in Tiananmen Square. This had slightly opened up Britain’s strict immigration controls by offering up to 50,000 selected British subjects in Hong Kong the right of abode in Britain. This had been a modest attempt to calm the community at a time when people were very worried about the prospect of the arrival of communist China and the PLA only eight years after the bloodshed in Beijing. Ever since then the formal policy of the Hong Kong government had been that all the existing dependent-territory passport holders in Hong Kong should be offered right of abode in the UK. David Wilson had always said this, and if I had said anything different I would have been not only out of line with an existing policy (carefully agreed with this UK government) but would also have created an enormous row in Hong Kong itself. I would also have been saying something that I didn’t believe. In my reply to the question, which came from the veteran BBC journalist Anthony Lawrence, I said that I thought that a British passport shouldn’t just be about helping people to hop on and off an aeroplane nor that this would mean that everyone with one of the dependent-territory passports would get on a plane and head for the United Kingdom.

Sunday 24 September

It turned out to be a slow news weekend, and my reply that the passport should give the right of abode has dominated the news in Britain and on the World Service. There were of course time lags between the recording and the broadcast, but Lord Tebbit, lots of right-wing Conservative MPs and the tabloid press went nuclear as soon as the programme was aired. The gunfire sounds as the passport war rages. I am accused of grandstanding and of raising expectations. Maybe I should have nuanced the issue a little, but I said what I thought and we should probably have this argument now rather than wait for a year or two. Michael Howard^fn4 slapped the idea down very smartly and has said that the government is not going to change its policy. No surprises there. Jack Straw says the same – if anything he goes rather further and says that there are Indians and Africans in the queue for British nationality who would have pride of place over Hong Kongers any day. There is of course a moral case for us to give British citizens a proper passport rather than simply a travel document. In any event they are exceptionally unlikely to take up the chance of living in Britain at the moment. There are hundreds of millions of Europeans who could theoretically live in Britain tomorrow but they won’t do so. It is quite revealing that from 1990 to 1994, 140,000 Hong Kongers went to live in Canada, 70,000 to the US, 56,000 to Australia, 17,500 to New Zealand and only just over 5,000 to the United Kingdom.

Monday 25 September

The tabloids are in full cry. They are after my blood. Too long in the sun. Flunkies and all that grand living have gone to his head. Out of touch with reality. Well, at least no one now will think that I’m hunting for a Conservative seat.

I am going to ask Jimmy McGregor^fn5 to join Exco. He will be a good representative of the better parts of the business community and will be useful in building bridges to Martin Lee and the other Democrats in Legco. After Edward’s birthday tea we had dinner with Paul Bryan and his wife, Cynthia. Paul was the leader of the small delegation of MPs when I first came to Hong Kong as a young backbencher in 1979, and he told rather a charming story. They have had dinner with an elderly Chinese businessman, a refugee from the mainland and an old friend. He couldn’t stop talking about the vote he had cast in the Legco elections. It was the first time he had ever voted and he was obviously extremely excited about it.

Tuesday 26 September

The media storm over passports has abated a bit. Both William Shawcross and Hugo Young have now written supportive articles and there is a good leader in The Times. After Exco I had a perfectly calm and intelligent discussion with Tsang Yok-sing and colleagues from the pro-Beijing Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong (DAB HK), who didn’t cry foul over losing to the Democrats in the elections. After that, a talk to John Gray, who is leaving HSBC next summer. I suggested that, if he leaves a bit earlier, I can put Vincent Cheng onto Exco. Vincent works for the Hang Seng Bank, which is largely owned by HSBC. He has been an appointed member of Legco and is a moderate centrist. I obviously couldn’t have two members from the bank at the same time. John was wholly amenable to this idea and very supportive on passports. Exco will soon be a bit different. With Lydia going, I’m going to make Rosanna Wong the senior member, and Jimmy McGregor and Vincent Cheng will join us.

A telephone conversation with Jeremy Hanley in which he was perfectly friendly but wanted to check that I’m not launching some great campaign on passports. He gives the impression that he thinks that what I said was a gaffe. He seemed rather surprised when I told him it has been the Hong Kong government’s policy for over five years.

Wednesday 27 September

I talked to Vincent. He wants to build bridges with the Democrats and is delighted by the offer of a seat on Exco.

Thursday 28 September

A very unpleasant visit to three temporary housing areas, which turns into a bit of a disaster. I have seen a few of these areas before – about half a dozen – sometimes on my own and sometimes with the press. This time, we learned just before we went that there was probably going to be trouble, and there certainly was. The first stop was pretty straightforward, just some peaceful petitioners. But things had really been stirred up at the second and third temporary housing areas. There were accusations that we have broken our word about clearing them, which is actually untrue, though that obviously doesn’t win any points. We are retaining some, which we need to do to have somewhere to put new immigrants from China and people who were cleared from squatter areas. Anyway, we are surrounded by demonstrators who are egged on by some of the social workers who – allegedly – work in the camps developing the community. They’ve certainly developed it in at least one sense. I completed the programme but we were surrounded by yelling crowds, people wanting to present me with rats, people sitting down in front of us, and others trying to push children and old people into the firing line. It all ended with an attempt to block the departure of my car. The television pictures are awful and I was worried about the safety of my bodyguards and the officials who were with me. What is true is that the housing in these places is awful and the fact that we’ve been steadily getting rid of them doesn’t really count if you’re still having to live there. Sangfroid is much diminished, but the only real response is to go somewhere else that is a real black spot as soon as possible.

Saturday 30 September

Cheering news from Laura yesterday, who has been promoted at her magazine. She is going to be assistant to the beauty editor, a very suitable post as far as the subject is concerned, says her father. Lowering my spirits, I had to go again through the annual routine of the NCNA China National Day reception. This morning the papers were full of an attack by the vice director of the NCNA on what I said at this reception. I had mentioned the successful Legco elections and referred to the fact that neither the vice director nor myself would be around 50 years after 1997 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Hong Kong Special Administration Region (SAR). I’m not sure whether the problem is that he thinks he will be here in 2047 and that I have been rude about his prospects of longevity.

It’s Alice’s birthday and we’ve come up to Fanling with lots of her friends. We are preparing for a potentially difficult week with Qian’s visit to London. In Hong Kong we are on the edge of another typhoon, which means that Exco is cancelled. After lunch I had a call from the Prime Minister, who wanted to talk about his meeting with Qian. I went through what I think he might say and underline the importance of flagging up our concern about Legco.

Tuesday 3 October

Apparently Qian’s visit to London started well yesterday when he met Michael Heseltine, and his meeting with the Secretary of State also went extremely well. We got agreement on our own proposals for contacts with the civil service and with the Preparatory Committee, and they have also agreed to set up an expert group under the two ambassadors who run our respective teams in the JLG to discuss the final departure ceremony. There seems to be broad acceptance of the need to resolve problems about the container terminal. Malcolm didn’t raise the future of Legco, nor did the Prime Minister. But apparently when they came out of the Foreign Office for a stand-up with the press, there were a couple of questions to Qian about Legco and he said bluntly that it wouldn’t have a role after 1997. Malcolm was standing next to him and said nothing as if he implicitly accepted it, which was clearly a mistake. But Malcolm didn’t have an interpreter so he didn’t know what Qian was saying. I sense trouble and have phoned Sherard to say that somebody must say something about Legco and the sooner the better.

Wednesday 4 October

The trouble has come pouring out just about as badly as is possible. Whether or not it was inadvertent, FCO officials aren’t helping. The papers in Hong Kong are full of how we didn’t raise Legco and there are also stories of Foreign Office officials in effect saying that I’ve been sidelined and that things don’t have to be seen ‘through the prism’ of the Governor of Hong Kong. So instead of the story being that, within 2½ weeks of the Legco elections, we have got all these deals with China, which shows that you can stand up to them and still do business, it is that we have done business with China because we have sidelined the Governor and Legco. One reason why this is annoying is because it removes the chance of building up people’s confidence here in their ability to stand up for themselves. Another is that it’s going to make it more difficult to handle Martin and the Democrats. Martin Lee inevitably goes off the deep end. He says that the Foreign Office is up to its old tricks. Cradock rules, OK. (Or as self-styled wits claiming to be dyslexic scrawl on lavatory walls, Cradock rules, KO.) The Governor is ignored. While there is always a tendency to put the worst construction on things, there is no question that the Foreign Office have cocked up quite seriously, both explicitly through briefings and doubtless through their body language. All the pro-Beijing press here is of course delighted. Meanwhile Anson and Michael Sze are explaining the sensible arrangements for civil servants seeing representatives of the future SAR government. At least everyone is happy about that.

Sidelining stories are continuing and we have gone into damage control, pointing out that Jeremy Hanley had set out our position on Legco last Friday, that Qian had set out China’s position over the weekend, and that after that plainly both sides had nothing to gain in a meeting of just over an hour by a further sterile exchange. I have to say that this isn’t very convincing. We are always trying to get other countries to raise Legco and related matters with the Chinese, but why should they do so when we don’t? Somebody has pointed out, all too accurately, that the State Department seems to be rather more supportive of Hong Kong than the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. The Foreign Office are doing a bit of damage control too, claiming that Nigel Sheinwald (the head of the news department), who was the most damaging source of the story about sidelining, was quoted out of context. But the main journalist who wrote the story for Hong Kong – David Wallen, a very trustworthy journalist for the SCMP [South China Morning Post] in London – is a reliable man and stands by his story. I know who I believe.

Thursday 5 October

The FCO has eventually put out a statement on Legco and the Foreign Secretary has agreed to write an article for the Hong Kong papers. He is also going to say something in his speech to the party conference about Hong Kong. He phoned this evening to give a quasi-apology, saying that his brief had only said he was to raise Legco if it was raised with him. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper! The trouble is it was actually raised with him in front of the cameras although he didn’t know it at the time. There’s no point in me having a row with Malcolm, who is a good man. On the other hand, his officials have behaved in a rather sneaky way. So the story is all about good old FCO rescuing Sino-British relations and getting deals that Hong Kong couldn’t get. Don’t ask me this week whether I trust the Foreign Office in London. We predicted that China would start doing business in the second half of the year. That is what they have done. But so far they have been doing business on our terms because we have been tough and shown that we have got a bottom line. That is not how it now looks.

Friday 6 October

Even worse today is an awful piece in the Economist: Patten sidelined to get deal with China. It’s by an excellent journalist, Dominic Ziegler, who phones to apologize and to say that he realizes he got it wrong. He says the main reason is that he had several steers from officials in London. He is not the sort of man I disbelieve. Another consequence of the sidelining story is that we have lost an initiative which we were about to launch. We have invited Zhou Nan to come in for a briefing on my Legco speech. His officials were plainly gobsmacked. They still haven’t come back to us. My guess is that they are trying to clear it with Qian. They won’t want to come. It would have been a good ploy as well as a sensible thing to do had the week not turned out as it has. Now if it happens it will doubtless be read as ‘Rifkind orders governor to see Zhou Nan’.

Monday 9 October

To kick off the week of my big policy speech to Legco, Percy Craddock has given a long interview to RTHK calling me the ‘incredible shrinking governor’. When I said to Edward that it’s rather a good phrase and I’m surprised that he didn’t go into politics, Edward replied, ‘But he did.’ Just to fill my cup, I’m told that his life was made complete when he was invited by the FCO to the dinner in London for Qian.

Julian Seymour, Margaret Thatcher’s private secretary, came in to talk about the plans for her visit in January. She is coming here on her way from Taiwan. I’ve been invited to her 70th birthday party at Claridge’s but alas can’t make it. I’m sure that Ted Heath will be sad for me.

Wednesday 11 October

Going down to the Legco building to make my speech, there was the usual line of petitioners outside, but this year there were some new faces. Several of the old faces are now actually inside, in the case of one of the best-known campaigners in Hong Kong (known as ‘the bull’) wearing a tie for the occasion. As ever my speech was long. I went through all the figures which show that we’ve started a real revolution in social welfare in the last three years. Spending has gone up by 40% in real terms. Spending on the elderly alone has increased by over half in real terms. I think there’s a chance that during my five years here we will move from second-world provision to first-world provision for the needy. Last year I was accused of not saying enough about bread-and-butter issues. I didn’t make the same mistake this time which is one of the reasons for the length of my oration. I not only pointed out where we have made progress but also touched on some of the things that we haven’t managed to achieve. I made a big deal of the balanced changes that we are intending to make to the Labour Importation Scheme, reducing the number of people covered from 25,000 to 5,000, and setting out how much better targeted it is going to be in future. I also said quite a bit about the success of the Legco elections, expressed the hope that the new Legco will recognize its responsibilities, and said that were anything to be done which appeared to damage Hong Kong’s prospects or economic solvency I would have to turn it down with the powers that I already have.

Thursday 12 October

This morning I went to RTHK for a phone-in programme, which lasted for an hour and a half. At the end there were still calls stacked up by the dozen. At a Legco Q and A session I was expecting questions about what one or two papers have called my threat of a veto to Legco (i.e. my suggestion that I don’t have to accept everything Legco proposes whatever its consequences), but no question came.

Emily Lau and Christine Loh are off to Geneva next week for the UN hearings on Hong Kong’s position under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights [ICCPR]. More trouble, I dare say. But Emily has told some Labour MPs this week (just before denouncing me, that is) that I’m the best Governor there has ever been. I’m not sure she would think that others had set the bar very high! I did get rather soft questions in Legco from the DAB HK. That will probably change, but I keep on surprising my staff by saying that I find them largely painless to deal with.

We are starting to get a little whiff of nervousness in London, where some officials are becoming alarmed at reports that Britain has given up caring about Hong Kong in return for trade deals in China. They are apparently trying to persuade Michael Heseltine to address the issue in his speech to the Trade Development Council. I rather doubt that he will do this in the terms they would want, but they’ve only got themselves to blame for getting into this trouble – and particularly for getting us into this trouble.

This afternoon I saw a group of Labour MPs led by Paul Murphy, their Hong Kong spokesman. They are decent, helpful and interested. I told them the sort of problems that they could expect to face if they were to come into government in the spring of 1997 – passports for the ethnic minorities here, the Vietnamese migrants left in the camps, the extent to which Britain would stand up for Hong Kong over the Joint Declaration after 1997, the pressure from some business lobbies to wash our hands of any sense of responsibility for the territory, last-minute problems about the handover ceremonies and so on. They obviously realize that we have got quite a lot of support in the community, though the critics are out and about as well. I then had a briefing from Joseph Yam (who runs the monetary authority) before my meeting with the Governor of the Bank of England next week. The Governor wants to talk about our economic prospects and the long-term position here of our major British banks.

Friday 13 October

Before I went off for a public meeting on my Legco speech at City Hall, we had the official launch at GH of the Society for AIDS Care. Lavender has put a lot of work into this and the government has now given the charity a house in the New Territories for a residential centre for AIDS patients. The AIDS home care nursing service is also about to begin work.

I’m going to have a grim week preparing loads of speeches for our short trip to London, which begins on Friday. At a meeting with the CBF (Bryan Dutton) we looked at Chinese requests to move in a substantial shadow garrison well ahead of June 1997. As far as I’m concerned it is absolutely no deal. The CBF has also worked out some pretty good ideas for the handover ceremonies, though I’m not sure that the Chinese will warm to the idea of one of our royal visitors inspecting a Chinese guard of honour alongside me. The most difficult thing I have to write is a lecture for the Conservative Political Centre on Britain, China and Asia, and what we can all learn from one another. I’ll do my usual stuff about ‘Asian values’ (values are not localized but universal) and something on the importance in Britain of following Asian countries and not allowing the state’s take of national income to rise too high. I want finally to say something positive about Europe.

Tuesday 17 October

This week’s Exco is Vincent Cheng’s first and John Gray’s last. Jimmy McGregor won’t arrive until next week. We had a discussion on student fees and the unit costs of higher education. The costs of tertiary education have gone up too much and we have to take this into account in any proposals on the proper level of fees. The expansion of tertiary education in Hong Kong has been a terrific success story, but the long-term financial bill is going to be too much both for the taxpayer and for students and their families.

Wednesday 18 October

Graham Fry is staying with us. He has taken over from Christopher Hum with responsibility for China, our own affairs and those of much of Asia. He brings to the job the great advantage of being a Japanologist who isn’t carrying all the baggage of having been a Cradock acolyte for years. He is obviously bothered that the Qian visit went so badly for us and appears to have a fairly clear-headed view of British interests being at least related in some ways to behaving decently in Hong Kong. Lord Elgin^fn6 looks in for a meeting. Three people can’t help themselves and ask me afterwards whether he has lost his marbles. The old and familiar ones are the best. An ancestor was responsible for giving the order to burn down the Summer Palace in Beijing so I hope nobody tells the NCNA that he has spent some time with me.

Thursday 19 October

A legal subcommittee of the PWC have advised that the Bill of Rights should be gutted and so should other bills that we have changed in order to make sure that they are consistent with the ICCPR. They say that the changes we have made will weaken the forces of law and order and therefore the executive. This makes quite a few people in the community wonder what they have in mind which might provoke disorder.

Friday 20–Sunday 29 October

With Lavender to London. I’ve had a very full programme seeing the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary, the Home Secretary, senior officials, Robin Cook, Paddy Ashdown^fn7 and Menzies Campbell^fn8. I also spoke at the universities of Oxford and Buckingham, the Institute of Directors business conference on Hong Kong, the Conservative Political Centre [CPC] and the Trade Development Council annual dinner. All the speeches went well but there was a surprisingly large controversy about my CPC speech, which was full of qualifications but basically said that the state in much of western Europe takes a share of national incomes well beyond what individual countries are earning. The press line is – Patten moves to the right. At the end of the week, Tony Blair claims that the speech demonstrates a general rightward lurch by Tories, which I guess has much to do with party management and the general assault on us. Just for good measure Denis MacShane, (a Labour MP who happened to be at school with me) and is a perfectly amiable cove, says that I have abused my position as a public servant to help the party and should resign. Other comments include one description of my speech as being like driving a Formula One car through a wood without hitting any of the trees. What I said was, however, factually correct – and, interestingly, Chancellor Kohl said much the same thing at his CDU party conference this week. So has he lurched to the right as well? It’s also of course pretty much what John Major and Kenneth Clarke have been saying for months if not years. I have not suddenly morphed into John Redwood (as he would be the first to admit).

The most important and difficult meeting of the week was with Michael Howard on visa-free access for Hong Kong passport holders. He refused to accept that in political terms there is a distinction between right of abode and immigration on the one hand and visa-free access, that is easier travel, on the other. He has always had the annoying habit of simply repeating his own arguments and not listening to other people’s. His case is that certificate of identity holders today need a visa and that their successors, SAR passport holders, will need a visa after 1997. So we are not changing anything. I deployed all the obvious arguments in response. The rest of the world will follow suit if we don’t give these passport holders free access and blame Britain for their own decisions. The Chinese will be able to make it look as though Britain doesn’t give a toss about Hong Kong and that we are motivated by racism, and the community will agree with this. It will also look as though we are undermining Hong Kong’s future commercial importance by making it more difficult for people to travel in and out of Hong Kong. Britain’s long-term commercial interests in Asia will suffer, and it will make governing Hong Kong much more difficult over the next year or so. But I got nowhere with him. He is dug in, and even though the Prime Minister, his deputy, the Foreign Secretary and many MPs are on our side (and even some of his own officials), he reckons that he has the tabloid papers in his corner so he won’t budge. Tabloids – even more than Percy Cradock – Rule on this.

John Major was in the best form I have seen him in for a long time. Everyone agrees that the economy is in good shape with net disposable income now rising. But none of this seems to make a scrap of difference to the government’s chances. The Labour lead in the opinion polls seems set in concrete. This defies most of the usual laws of politics. Economy up, politics still down – discuss. There was the usual conversation about returning to British politics, but it doesn’t seem a very appetizing prospect. What I would really like is an interesting international job, but you can’t campaign for those and you certainly can’t plan for them either.

It was great to see Kate and Laura and Laura’s new black and white cocker spaniel, which was given to her by her friends for her birthday. It’s clearly a barmy gift but it’s a lovely little dog. While on the subject of dogs, at a dinner with some friends Lavender has a go at Douglas Hogg^fn9 about pet quarantine and rabies. He obviously gave her a fairly dusty answer and does not, she thinks, seem to know much about the subject. If she has anything to do with it, he will soon. Whisky and Soda and their owner don’t give up easily.

Monday 30 October

The argument about the Bill of Rights continues to rage. Beijing is more or less saying that it backs the PWC position but the public mood has been very hostile. I made a little speech this evening to a dinner organized by the management committee and board of Bank of America, noting that not everyone seems to agree with me that the future lies with those communities that can offer both economic freedom and human freedom as well, but everyone seems to want to live in such places themselves. I am going to have to go on making the distinction between what so many rich people think is all right for Hong Kong and what they want for their own families.

Tuesday 31 October

We had a long discussion at Exco about the forthcoming Geneva UN Human Rights Committee report. It seems likely to be positive on some things but critical on the treatment of Vietnamese migrants, the police complaints machinery, the independence of the legal aid service and the existence of functional constituencies.

Wednesday 1 November

A public holiday – the day when everyone goes and sweeps their ancestors’ graves. This has always seemed to me to be rather an admirable way of remembering one’s own family. It is far too long since I visited my own parents’ graves. My parents lie side by side, and close to my stepfather, in a rather cheerless cemetery in Greenford. Perhaps that shouldn’t matter, but I like the idea of an old churchyard, a decent view and a few trees somewhere that encourages the living to visit. It’s interesting that despite this annual family event, so many of the Chinese seem reluctant to talk about death or even to use the word.

Thursday 2 November

Boris Johnson,^fn10 who used to be a correspondent in Brussels, has written a piece about me for the Daily Telegraph which is surprisingly kind. I’m quite pleased that the only person who is rude about me in the article is David Chu,^fn11 whose name Johnson spells very satisfactorily as though he was a character out of Thomas the Tank Engine. That is how I will remember him from now on, Choo Choo. (He claims to be a close friend of Lu Ping; but when I sat next to him at a dinner he was unpleasantly bitchy about him.) Peter Woo^fn12 will get into some difficulties as he is quoted as saying that the British have had the Chinese under their thumb for 150 years but ‘we are the masters now’. Letters of apology arrive from him every few moments but this may not have been the best way of securing a knighthood.

Friday 3 November

So far it’s the Democrats who are behaving pretty well in Legco and Allen Lee’s lot, who insist on calling themselves Liberals, who are looking for populist issues on which to bash the government. They have led the efforts to block increases in fees and charges and voted against my Legco Address whereas the Democrats voted for it. We are continuing to defend our sensible package of proposals on labour importation.

A group of senior expatriate civil servants has just been to Beijing. They are in a real difficulty. They can’t now get to the top of the service because of the requirements of the Basic Law (reserving top jobs to those who are ethnically Chinese), but they want to stay in it. Many of them are real Hong Kongers married to local girls. I hope they don’t believe that all this democracy business has screwed things up for them.

In a discussion about our last Honours List I mused with Martin and Edward about who will actually want to take them. Answer: no problems there, and we’re actually trying to get an increase in the number of awards that we usually hand out. I had my most interesting meeting for some time with the two trade unionist legislators (Lau and Lee, who both spring from the Christian Socialist movement) and an international trade unionist delegation. They mostly wanted to talk about the state of our labour laws and their relationship to the Bill of Rights. They were very well briefed and made their points cogently and courteously.

Saturday 4 November

The UN Human Rights Commission report has been published saying more or less what we anticipated. I’m pleased they have made it abundantly clear that China will have an obligation after 1997 to report on compliance with the International Covenant. That is an obligation both under the Joint Declaration and under case law, which has been built up since the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. I spoke later in the day to a reasonably supportive delegation from the US Council on Foreign Relations, and was delighted that one of their members is Richard Solomon, whose excellent book on negotiating with the Chinese I recommend to everyone. They have of course been told by some of the businessmen they’ve met not to make a fuss if China steamrollers human rights in Hong Kong after the handover.

Sunday 5 November

No fireworks, but we did attend the Scout rally for an hour and a half. I am the Chief Scout, but since I don’t wear ceremonial uniform elsewhere, I don’t have to wear shorts when I’m doing my scouting business. Fortunately, no knots or toggles are involved. But, as the Chief Justice (who is the president of the Scouts) observes, I would march better than they do. ‘No sense of rhythm,’ he kept on muttering.

Monday 6 November

The JLG team are still away bonding, so they say, though there isn’t much sign of it just at the moment, particularly given the promises made at the Qian meeting in London, and the row over the Bill of Rights and associated legislation resonates. All the media are being taken up to Beijing at the moment for struggle sessions. According to the NCNA, one by one the papers are told that they should be more positive in their coverage of China.

I had a talk to Donald Tsang about the economic outlook. He is rather more confident about the future than I am. Unemployment is largely the result of a huge increase in the workforce over the last couple of years. It hasn’t been matched by an equivalent increase in the number of jobs that we create. We have actually increased jobs by about 2½% but the workforce has increased by almost 4½% – returning emigrants from Canada, Australia and so on, and an increase in the number of legal Chinese immigrants. In 1993 and 1994 it increased by 180,000; in the previous five years, it had increased by only 60,000, and in three years out of these five years it actually fell. At the same time consumer confidence remains flat, with some impact on the retail sector and restaurants. I hope that confidence will start to go up over the next year, though it certainly won’t happen if China continues to sound off as has happened in the last few days over the Bill of Rights.

The Police Commissioner told me again about his concern that crime in China may be spilling over into Hong Kong. We have got a range of difficult security issues just ahead of us, all of them with human rights aspects such as telephone interceptions, official secrets, sedition and treason. Happy days will be here again.

Tuesday 7 November

After a reception in the evening at Government House for the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme, we went off for what I was told would be ‘a quiet dinner’ for my tailor, Sam, otherwise known as Manu Melwani. It had been turned into a great banquet for most of the Indian community, including all the Harilelas, who are Hong Kong’s South Asian royalty. The women were dressed up to the nines in fabulous saris and covered in jewels. There was wonderful Indian food, dancing and lots of speeches. During the course of the evening Manu was decorated by the Belgian Consul-General with an award he has received for making suits for the Crown Prince. The Order of the Inside Leg Measurement First Class. I made a speech towards the end and we then left the party in full Indian swing. I think Sam deserves the ‘face’ he got tonight. He is a Hong Kong institution, has given us and our guests excellent and quick results, and he has the best intelligence network in Hong Kong. Lance Brown told me that he often seems to know who is coming to stay with us before we do.

Wednesday 8 November

I discussed the discouraging lack of progress in the JLG with Hugh Davies and Alan Paul, focussing on the blocking of awards of franchises for new mobile phone operators in a way which is plainly an intervention in the affairs of the Hong Kong government. It may be that the Chinese are being lobbied by existing telecommunications companies in the city who don’t want any more competition (it has to be noted that Lu Ping’s son works for Hong Kong Telecoms), or perhaps the Chinese think that it will be just too difficult to tap a larger number of new lines. Whatever the reasons, it’s rather threatening for the future.

Thursday 9 November

The unemployment summit, which has been looming over me, actually went rather well, not least because of the advice of my really excellent private secretary, John Tsang, and our outstanding departmental secretary, Joseph Wong. Of course, we didn’t get agreement on labour importation, but there was a positive atmosphere and we can certainly say that there has been a constructive effort at cooperation on other issues such as training and retraining. Joseph has done well in avoiding anything coming to a crunch on labour importation and it may be that we can put off the evil day indefinitely.

Friday 10 November

The employment summit doesn’t seem to have played too badly in the press, though the Chinese-language papers still expect us to produce rabbits from hats (actually, I received a tortoise from a union representative in a box which is now browsing in the garden). We are more worried by the mobile phones issue. Where it is clear that some interested business lobbies are trying to get Beijing to intervene in decisions that the Hong Kong government is taking on the future of this technology. This is dangerous because, first, it would suggest to the Chinese that we think they could go on intervening in issues like this after 1997. Second, it would encourage members of the business community to politicize every issue which they don’t like, and to go up to Beijing to lobby against decisions made by the government here which they believe don’t favour their own commercial interests. It’s interesting that it’s a few business leaders that are causing us the most problems, not Democrat legislators. Anson is adamant that the whole community has to be as one on issues like this if Hong Kong’s autonomy is to survive 1997.

Members of the government information service are back from their struggle session in Beijing along with representatives of the rest of the media. The director is putting a brave face on it all, but when questioned it became perfectly clear that anybody intelligent would have regarded the whole thing as an appalling disaster. Apparently everyone in the media will have to behave more patriotically after 1997. When I saw David Rockefeller from Chase Manhattan he asked me whether I would still give the same answer as I gave to him in October 1992, when he asked me if everybody was right to be so euphoric about China. I said much the same this time – namely that the right position is to be caught somewhere between euphoria and deep gloom.

I’ve had my first meeting with Rosanna Wong in her role, following Lydia, as convenor of Exco. She is a nice, intelligent woman who has done wonders at the Housing Authority, where she has been chairman and where there have been some real horrors in the in-tray – for example, how to deal with better-off tenants and with some of the incompetence in the management of the authority.

I’m told that last night we lost a vote at the Oxford Union saying that the British government had let Hong Kong down. Denis MacShane (him again) proposed the motion and Tim Renton gallantly argued on the other side. The criticism mostly seems to have been about pre-Patten governors and I daresay that the issue will get a bit of a run in the Hong Kong papers. I think I have only set foot once in the Oxford Union, the experience of a lifetime.

The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting is taking place in New Zealand and we’re anxious to get some suitable reference to Hong Kong in the communiqué. Christine Loh, Margaret Ng and Libby Wong are all in Auckland arguing away. I hope people listen to them. They certainly know as much or more about what democracy means as most people there.

Sunday 12 November

We had balls to attend on both Friday and Saturday nights. Today the Cenotaph service. Will these services continue after 1997? In the evening we went to eat hairy crabs with Anson and some of her family and Shanghainese friends. The hairy crabs are not all that easy to eat but delicious. Anson tells me that the CJ has emerged into the limelight on the Bill of Rights, which safely places Hong Kong’s freedoms under the rule of law.

Monday 13 November

I see what Anson means. The spokesman of the NCNA has made a statement saying that at a private dinner the Chief Justice had expressed reservations about the Bill of Rights, mainly arguing that it did override other legislation and that we would have been better off to have followed a different model such as the one in New Zealand. I wonder how much he knows about it. As I understand it, the New Zealand Bill is not entrenched above all because New Zealand is governed by parliamentary sovereignty. I wonder whether he gets the point or perhaps thinks that our legislature should be supreme. That might not be the view of the NCNA. I suggested that the Chief Secretary should get a written statement of his views. It would be nice to know what they are on anything really. He has now been spotted going in to see the Chief Secretary, so of course the story will be that he has been hauled in to explain himself and that the government is interfering with the judiciary. At best the CJ has been injudicious (not good for a judge) and it should remind people that in dealing with Beijing you are dealing with a mincing machine, or, as I have put it from time to time, trying to shake hands with a bacon slicer.

In the evening we went off to Jennifer Murray’s art exhibition opening at the China Club. I bought rather a nice painting for France. There is hardly anything that this couple don’t do except kowtow.

Thursday 16 November

While the CJ is apparently putting together a document setting out his views on the Bill of Rights, I had a question session in Legco. Most questions were about the bill, so I set out just why it isn’t in contravention of the Joint Declaration and the Basic Law. It hasn’t led to chaos in Hong Kong, but the laws that China says she wants to see put back on the statute book would lead to several contraventions of the Basic Law, which entrenches the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. I also mentioned several times the reporting conventions clearly set out in the Covenant. While one can only speculate about the reasons for the CJ jumping into this issue with the sharks of the NCNA, the sharks plainly thought that by quoting him they could swing the argument over the bill but they are being proved embarrassingly wrong. His published views the next day were as lame as we had expected. Someone, I am sure unfairly, said that it sounds as though he learnt his law off the back of a Corn Flakes packet.

In the afternoon we have a long meeting in Ad Hoc on the handover ceremony. I think it is going to be extremely difficult to reach agreement with China on a ceremony which meets our requirements as well as theirs. What I am determined to avoid is anything which would have us sneaking out of Hong Kong with our tail between our legs.

Tuesday 21 November

We talk in some detail at Exco about a response to the CJ. Andrew Li and Denis Chang suggest improvements to what is at present a rather legalistic draft. The points which we want to get upfront in our statement are clear: the Bill of Rights is entirely consistent with the Basic Law; its implementation has been very measured and does not lead to chaos; it has preserved a sensible balance between the individual and the state; and it reflects well on our society, including the judiciary.

I spent a lot of time in the afternoon discussing Vietnamese migrants. The truth is that there aren’t any alternatives to the course on which we are at present launched, trying to encourage the Vietnamese government to welcome as many migrants back as possible and, within the terms of the UNHCR agreement, to conduct mandatory returns in some circumstances of those who are plainly economic migrants, not political refugees. We operate within implacable but extraordinarily tight realities which close in on us the whole time. Altogether getting on for 200,000 Vietnamese – who mostly of course arrived by perilous sea voyages – have passed through Hong Kong in about 20 years; the greater part of them have settled abroad and the others have returned home. No one gets thanked for the work of looking after them in camps as humanely as possible and trying to move them on under the watchful eyes of civil liberties lawyers. The number still here has been steadily falling. We need to get the figure as close to zero as possible by the time we leave, but the problems don’t get any easier. First, the Vietnamese government drags its feet about the speed of return of migrants because of the costs involved, despite the financial assistance the migrants receive from the UN and us. Second, civil liberties groups continue to attack us for holding the Vietnamese migrants in camps and they challenge our policy in the courts. There is a particularly tricky issue facing us regarding the so-called pending cases, those that the Vietnamese government hasn’t yet cleared to return to the country. These cases are at present with the Privy Council. Third, American congressional opinion continues to give the Vietnamese the impression that if they hang on long enough and decline to return home, they will be allowed to go to the United States – which is totally untrue. Fourth, China and most populist opinion in Hong Kong, including Allen Lee’s lot in Legco, are totally opposed to the Vietnamese presence in Hong Kong and will use the issue to whip up resentment against Britain (for example, arguing that any migrants not returned by 1997 should go back to the United Kingdom with me). Fifth, the correctional services department and the police have an awful job coping with the migrants and they don’t much care for this part of their responsibilities. (Nor would I if I was in their position.) At the end of a very long meeting, we come to the conclusion that all we can do is to continue what we are already doing. I suppose that life is often like that, not always a bowl of cherries.

Wednesday 22 November

Sir S. Y. Chung, who in the view of cartoonists has gone from polishing Britain’s shoes to polishing Beijing’s, has made a pretty daffy speech suggesting that China should set up a shadow government during the last year of British sovereignty. When he was the senior member of Exco and arguing that the Joint Declaration did not go far enough, he was one of those who argued that they would only accept the Joint Declaration on the understanding that nothing was done which would undermine the effectiveness of government in Hong Kong before 30 June 1997, and that any erosion of governmental authority would have effects long after the transfer of sovereignty. Autres temps, autres mœurs as no one says here. In the afternoon I visited a methadone clinic as part of my anti-drugs campaign. The figures are actually showing some improvement. I think it helps to treat the problem principally as a public health issue, as we are doing, while of course continuing to go after the big traffickers.

Thursday 23 November

Lavender’s wonderful elderly friends Phyllis and Esme Wren (who have stayed with us before) arrive as well as Lady MacLehose, the widow of the former Governor. In addition, Len Appleyard has come down from Beijing and Graham Fry and Sherard Cowper-Coles from London for a meeting with my senior team to review policy on every front. They are useful meetings and may even have resulted in some greater mutual understanding. Graham Fry is extremely good to deal with and plainly gets on well with the FCO diplomats here and also the senior Hong Kong government officials. We seem to agree on most things in these meetings, though there is a bit of space between us on how much we should try to prioritize JLG work and how we can best carry forward issues on the nationality and visa agenda. After seeing Graham, my private office take down notices on our democracy wall which lists (as a sort of parody of the usual CCP-speak) the three FCO preservations – preserve the gradual restoration of relations; preserve the channel to Qian; preserve the warm afterglow. In a side meeting Len assures me that he has never worked against our policy and is a loyal member of the team.

Saturday 25 November

We have continued our bonding and strategy session and cover the handover ceremony and the discussions between our civil servants and Beijing officials. There was good news from Legco, where we won a vote to begin paying for the Provident Fund. This has been a long but ultimately successful struggle for the elderly. We’ve also got agreement from the Chinese side on issues related to the airport, particularly around appointments where they had wanted to go back on the original wording of the memorandum of understanding. We got the result because we stood firm.

Sunday 26 November

We have made two discoveries this weekend. First, Lady MacLehose, who is a little stiff to begin with, soon unbends, particularly after Lavender has taken her to a charming display of riding by disabled children. She founded the admirable association which promotes this back in the ’70s. We also discover that like her husband she enjoys a dry martini or even two. Second, between them in 1971 they saved the 135-year-old magnolia tree which stands in the middle of the lawn at the back of the house. They spent three years sedulously feeding the roots. She gets on famously with Phyllis, who paints away with her usual productivity. We are now encouraged by her to call her by her nickname, ‘Squeak’. My sister and her husband are also staying with us and have found her rather endearing.

Monday 27 November

Anson is away in France and Italy. We learnt today that she has had difficulty in Italy in seeing any political leader. Perhaps there aren’t any this week or maybe they are nervous about China. But the Pope gave her an audience, which was only marred by the fact that after giving her a rosary he said how much he looked forward to Hong Kong becoming independent in 1997. Perhaps he has had a message on the celestial grapevine.

It appears that we are likely to have both Malcolm Rifkind and Douglas Hurd in Hong Kong not long after Christmas at more or less the same time. At the JLG talks in Beijing, at which we are proposing (at their request) to tell the Chinese about our budget plans, one of their representatives has accused me of introducing welfarism and policies which would smash up the economy as a result. You might have thought that an official who represents an allegedly communist regime would be in favour of spending on welfare. Apparently not. Anyway, our own officials reacted courteously and firmly and in Putonghua.

Wednesday 29 November

Much of the local press today is very critical of the welfarism attack, but the pro-Beijing papers continue the assault and go on to describe me as a ‘big dictator’. Being such a diplomatic fellow there is an obvious rejoinder which I refrain from making. In London the Foreign Office have summoned a representative from the Chinese embassy and given him a ticking off about this attack on Hong Kong’s autonomy. The JLG team tell me the best of the metaphors used to attack our welfare spending. I am the driver of a Formula One racing car hurtling out of control and liable to crash and kill all 6 million Hong Kong people.

Friday 1 December

The argument has rumbled on through the week while Beijing practises what I think they call ‘splittism’, trying to drive a wedge between GH and our civil servants. We have had the first of our get-together sessions between the HKMAO and Hong Kong government officials. It’s gone pretty well. Not least because it’s a long way from where the Chinese wanted things to be – the handing over of personal files and senior officials being summoned to Beijing for interviews.

Sunday 3 December

I talked to Kim Salkeld about his extraordinary negotiations with the chief of staff of the Archbishop of Canterbury about whether the Archbishop should stay in GH when he is here. Apparently, the Archbishop himself is rather embarrassed about it since the local bishop has said that he shouldn’t come near GH because it will be bad for relations with China. It all seems a long way from the delegation of Anglican bishops who came to see me before I left for Hong Kong, led by the Archbishop of York, urging me to stand up for Hong Kong’s democracy and civil liberties. Last night we went to a play at Island School in which Alice is taking part, an excellent performance of The Crucible. Plainly the Anglican Bishop of Hong Kong should go along to see it. Taking rather a different line, Peter Barry preached at 9.30 mass in the cathedral this morning about an upcoming meeting between the local Catholic church and the Patriotic Church of China, which completely excludes the underground church. So I suppose we can welcome the fact that both the main Christian communities here are ‘broad’ churches.

Monday 4 December

Beijing has started rowing back on the idea of appointing a shadow government and on its attack on welfare spending. They must recognize that they have kicked several balls into their own net. The following day after Exco, C. H. Tung told me that he has been invited to go on the HKMAO’s Preparatory committee and after a great deal of wrestling with himself has decided to accept. I bet this contest did not go the full 15 rounds. I don’t really mind Exco members going on this committee, though I dare say that in due course there may be conflicts of interest. But we are bound to have lots of fuzzy edges over the next year to 18 months.

A meeting with the diplomat, Alan Collins, who runs our operations in Taipei. The last time I saw him he was the number two in Addis Ababa. He tells me that the Taiwanese are obsessed with what is happening in Hong Kong. Beijing seems to think that sabre rattling during the recent local elections in Taiwan helped to produce a stand-off in the results with a prize for everyone, and that this will encourage them to step things up in terms of threats between now and the presidential elections next spring.

In what has been quite a light week the most consequential meeting was over intellectual property theft. The Americans are starting to get critical of us for not doing more about this, and I think we should. One of the problems is that factories in China which are involved in for example CD-ROM piracy are owned by Hong Kongers, and Hong Kong is seen as the conduit for much of the trade in stolen intellectual property.

There have been lots of talks about how Malcolm Rifkind’s visits to Hong Kong and Beijing should be managed. He is kindly concerned to use his visit to make it clear that I’m not being sidelined, but I don’t think we should tie ourselves into knots about this. I am rather more worried about getting ministers back in London to make a decision about the visa-free access issue before Michael Howard goes solo and turns down the idea completely in evidence to the foreign affairs select committee, as he seems keen to do.

Wednesday 6 December

At my Business Council I did a bit of table thumping about how damaging it is when businessmen go up to China and lobby about decisions made in good faith by the government. This is of course exactly what has happened on reclamation, mobile phones and the container terminal. I made the same point to the new chairman of Cable & Wireless, Brian Smith, who gets it very quickly. He is a great improvement on his predecessor.

Thursday 7 December

The funniest moment of the week has been our visit to Macau for the opening of the new international airport there. Elaborate precautions were taken to ensure that we are not snubbed by the Chinese. Our friends, the Governor and his wife, are charming and as it turns out very resourceful. The plan involves getting Lavender and me to the airport before the Vice President of China, Rong Yiren, which involved our car overtaking his cavalcade on the way to the terminal. We managed it and got our handshakes in the terminal building and then went out onto the tarmac with hundreds of others to the coldest day I have known since we’ve been out here. There is a bitterly cold wind and two hours of speeches and ribbon-cutting by President Soares and others. It’s a bit shambolic but it goes off very well, and Lavender doesn’t think that anyone has actually died of hypothermia. When we left I got the usual stuff from the press about whether or not I am jealous of Portugal’s good relations with China. The fact of the matter is that Portugal gave up about 30 years ago and look at Macau now. Portugal has only stayed on as a favour to China. That’s one of the reasons why the Governor is such a hero.

Sunday 17 December

Lavender and I are on a short official visit to the Philippines. Manila is a chaotic place with all too many signs of poverty. It’s going to take them a long time to turn things around. They do seem to have started to open up their economy and are trying to reform the bureaucracy and the administration of justice, but there is a wild atmosphere about the place. (While we were there a distinguished Filipino Chinese businessman was assassinated.)

We had breakfast with President Ramos and his wife separately. Lavender thinks that she is a great character, interested in social issues and has had lots of rows with Cardinal Sin about contraception. She was also a world-class badminton player, so presumably has more trainers and fewer high heels than her predecessor. My own breakfast with President Ramos was predictably dominated by discussions about what is likely to happen to the 129,000 domestic helpers in Hong Kong after 1997. I could only give limited reassurance, but there is of course a worry that after 1997 the Filippinas will be sent home to make way for mainland Chinese. We have one niggling legal issue concerning a couple of Hong Kong citizens who are being held for drug offences of which it seems that they are probably innocent. The local justice system is taking a very long time to wend its way towards a conclusion, a point which I had to put rather delicately to the president.

The other memorable meeting is with Cardinal Sin himself. He told wonderful stories with scant regard for political correctness about his role in overthrowing Marcos. When I visited the old American base at Subic Bay, which has now been turned into a sort of enterprise zone attracting lots of investment from Taiwan and Hong Kong, I talked to some of the girls in the factories and discover they are paid about a third of what they would get as domestic helpers in Hong Kong.

Because of an accident which has put part of the runway in Manila out of operation, we had to go back in a private jet. It became apparent that the pilot has never landed at Kai Tak before. We had to give him directions about the final approach while wishing that Cardinal Sin had given us some rosary beads.

Discussing some polling figures on the transition, it’s interesting to see the extent to which Hong Kong people identified themselves as Hong Kong Chinese, or simply as Hong Kongers, or Hong Kong British, rather than as Chinese. If pressed by interviewers it seems that they would prefer some other future than the one they are going to get; in other words they would prefer to remain a British colony or to become an independent country or a member of the Commonwealth. It doesn’t bode well for the future that the Chinese have lost the hearts and minds battle hands down. Moreover, when people are asked an open-ended question about corruption in China the interviewers can’t get them to stop talking.

Monday 18 December

We are continuing to talk about the preparations for Malcolm Rifkind’s visit after Christmas. This is producing the usual crop of telegrams from the embassy in Beijing advising the Secretary of State against raising anything awkward with China. What that of course means is that they are advising him not to stand up for Hong Kong on anything. So what has changed after all the bonding?

We are starting to see names of the HKMAO Preparatory Committee which are beginning to dribble out; all the usual suspects and of course no sign of a Democrat. The CJ came in for a brief talk, as he does from time to time. He was rather contrite about the fuss over the Bill of Rights and thinks that this has hurt him and hurt the office. He is planning on retirement in the middle of next year. He says that Zhou Nan had invited him to a kiss-and-make-up dinner and asked him for his thoughts about a number of candidates for CJ. All the names Zhou suggested would have been ghastly. In the evening we gave a farewell dinner for Lydia Dunn and Michael Thomas. Lydia is cheerfully full of pessimism about the future.

Tuesday 19 December

After the GH Christmas lunch, I had a meeting with Martin Lee and his inner core of Democrats. They had announced that they were coming to see me to press the government on human rights. I spent most of the time giving them an amiable bashing over their unhelpfulness to the administration, stressing the extent to which civil servants are increasingly unable to do business with them. They look a little sheepish and, I think, take the point. But afterwards they went out and spoke to the press as though none of this has happened, and announced to the world that they had indeed bashed me over the head on human rights. Well, I want the administration of Hong Kong to go on moving forward reasonably effectively, and being bashed over civil rights by the Democrats is a reasonable price to be exacted for this.

Wednesday 20 December

I talked to Peter Sutch about Cathay’s problems. Larry Yung, the boss of Citic, has been speaking up for Hong Kong. It is ironic that it has taken a mainland businessman to do this. It may be because of CNAC’s [Chinese airline] attempts to screw Dragon and Cathay in Hong Kong – Citic have a big stake in Dragonair. Lavender took me on a tour of the staff quarters at GH, something she does fairly frequently with Elspeth. They compare pretty favourably with most housing authority flats. We gave a farewell dinner for the Nogamis, the Japanese consul-general and his wife. He is pessimistic about Hong Kong’s future and says that this is the view of the Japanese business community as well. They think that China will interfere in quite a big way, if not immediately then soon enough, and that corruption will take off.

Friday 22 December

Last night we had carols at Government House as ever. Today I opened the new park at what used to be the Kowloon walled city. It’s a great improvement: I used to find the walled city quite spooky. Kate and Laura arrived.

Saturday 23 December

I crashed what is normally Lavender’s personal treat and helped her open the flower, bird, fish and insects show at Fanling. All the girls came with us and enjoyed it as much as we do.

While of course I don’t care a toss about these things – oh, really? – there is an opinion poll out today which gives my approval rating as 74%, up on last year. Maybe Jiang Zemin will ask me to stay on.

Friday 5 January 1996

We had a tiptop Christmas. Lots of people in the house, almost every bed occupied. Good walks, especially a lovely hike out in Sai Kung followed by a delicious lunch at the restaurant belonging to our Chinese friend from Blackpool. It’s beautiful, quiet countryside and you wouldn’t know that you are so close to the heart of the city. One evening there was a very smart party at the Grand Hyatt organized by Lydia and Michael Thomas to say goodbye to all their friends. There was a slight feeling of Come Dancing about it because Lydia had invited all her ballroom dancing partners, including her teachers. There was a photographic and video show about Lydia and Michael which didn’t quite claim that they had built the pyramids or discovered penicillin. No one is surprised to see them go but it’s still sad. At the end of Christmas week we went off with all the girls and some friends to stay on an island in the Philippines. We had our own small house on the beach; the weather was hot with a strong breeze; I laid about and read three novels for the first time in ages. Kate and Alice did a scuba-diving course and qualified. Blissful.

Sunday 7 January

Not only is Malcolm Rifkind in town with his wife, Edith, but Douglas Hurd is here as well. It was only by the skin of our teeth that we avoided having Robin Cook in the same week. I had breakfast with Douglas, who is full of supportive wisdom and so laid back that he is virtually horizontal. He is much enjoying being relieved of the burdens of the Foreign Secretaryship. Malcolm is clearly greatly excited by his responsibilities and seems wholly on top of everything quickly. We all went for a long walk and picnic on Lantau guided by Kim, starting at the Buddha, where the crowds were very enthusiastic about me, which had some effect on Malcolm. He is being lobbied by Jardine’s on the takeover code and by Swire’s on the activities of CNAC (with British Airways pulling the other way and undertaking to help CNAC with the latter’s application to become a carrier in Hong Kong). He said that he wants to speak up on the Bill of Rights and Legco while sounding a realistic note about the prospects ahead.

I tried to brief him on the gracelessness of the reactions that he may get in Hong Kong. Sometimes people come here and are so overwhelmed by the extreme lack of generosity in the reactions they get that they start to wonder whether it’s worthwhile making much of an effort about Hong Kong. I think this is at least partly a result of years of colonial patronizing and even from time to time duplicity – or at least failure to tell the whole truth. My FCO officials here and senior Hong Kong advisers briefed him over dinner in the evening. He asked intelligent questions and received bright replies. I think that he is genuinely impressed by the quality of our team here. I used to say that about London officials too when Peter Ricketts was there. Still, Graham Fry is a great improvement on the recent past.

Monday 8 January

After he presided at a topping-out ceremony for the new consulate general, visited Eastern District with me, where there was a good reception, and spoke at a lunch with the British Chamber of Commerce, Malcom went down to Legco for a question-and-answer session. Inevitably, since it is my trade too, I observed his performance with considerable interest. He was very good indeed – on top of his material, probably more direct than I would be, and unlike me answers hypothetical questions with very brisk replies. One result was that some Legco members and some of the press didn’t like the answers, mostly because they are true. For example, he stated bluntly that we will not take any Vietnamese migrants back with us if they are left in 1997. They will not be our responsibility. He was clear about all the human rights issues and about Britain’s responsibilities to stand up for them under the Joint Declaration after the handover. There is something which is terrific for my morale as a politician about seeing another politician at the top of his game. Over dinner he said to me that, even though people like Martin Lee and Emily Lau are a bit aggravating, he identifies with their values and wholly understands why they take the point of view that they do. Exactly.

Tuesday 9 January

An intelligent discussion at Exco at which our lawyers were on cracking form talking about the rule of law and local autonomy, with just the right audience in Malcolm. It was a successful visit insofar as it is possible these days for a British minister to come, be subjected to the politics of Hong Kong, and escape unscathed. I hope that it demonstrates to people from time to time what a difficult job we all have here. We saw Malcolm and Edith off on the plane to Beijing with arguments about the importance of securing visa-free access for SAR passport holders ringing in their ears.

Wednesday 10 January

In Beijing, Malcolm had a long meeting with Qian in which he was given lots of assurances about the container terminal and the continuing rights of permanent residents to stay in Hong Kong after the handover. He also made progress on air service agreements and on the SAR passport, and over and again delivers the same sermon in public and private on confidence, relating it to Legco, the Bill of Rights and dialogue with the Democrats. Nobody could accuse him of not talking up Hong Kong. Just to show how much he likes Britain, Li Peng tells him how enthusiastic he is about Wall’s ice cream. I think that it is actually made in Italy but we should take any praise we can.

Thursday 11 January

The Chinese have started trying to claw back what have been taken to be helpful concessions on their part. At a meeting with Lu Ping, he began putting in all sorts of qualifications on right of abode after 1997 and the container terminal. It does make one wonder what is the point of negotiating with the CCP. They only give you what they want to give you; a visit is regarded as successful if they are not downright rude. Reiterating what they have already promised to do in a treaty, for example, ensuring that Hong Kong enjoys a high degree of autonomy, is taken by parts of the press as a great breakthrough.

Friday 12 January

Legco has agreed to some ferry fare increases and the unions have accepted our revised proposals on labour importation about which we have done so much negotiating. We have decided to drop a bill on broadcasting dealing with issues like balance and public service principles. If we try to push it through before July next year, China will get stuck into it. This is the sort of issue which should be entirely a matter for an autonomous SAR. There’s just a chance that after 1997 the SAR government may be able to get away with it if they wish.

Discussing the future of the judiciary with Anson and others, it was clear that if the present CJ can be persuaded to hang on until the end of this year, the Chief Executive designate could make the new appointment, which we all hope would be Andrew Li, who would be far and away the most qualified candidate.

Monday 15 January

We are starting to think about the next big visit, which should be by the Prime Minister in early March. But I don’t think it will make sense unless we’ve got the right decision on visa-free access by then. We’re starting to plan what I hope will be the last stage of our campaign on this.

Tuesday 16 January

Bob Peirce and I had a meeting with Francis Cornish, Adrian Swire, Peter Sutch and Rod Eddington of Cathay about the company’s position in regard to the Chinese airline CNAC. I am not sure that Cathay has a strategy on this. Obviously, from our point of view, we need to do everything we can to push any decisions back beyond 1997. I think it will be more difficult for CNAC to muscle their way into Hong Kong immediately after the transition. As for the longer term, who knows? The government team seems much clearer about what Cathay should be up to than they are themselves. Adrian Swire still appears to repose a great deal of faith in past assurances that he has had from Chinese leaders. But who on earth would believe any of them, not least if money is involved?

After this I had a talk with Martin Lee and gave him a readout on the Foreign Secretary’s visit to Beijing. The conventional view is that the Chinese reached the conclusion last year that they should warm up their bilateral relationship with Britain and that they should do business on strictly economic issues, but that they didn’t intend to budge on the big political matters. There are rumours that Martin Lee and the Democrats have been approached by the Chinese side. Martin doesn’t give any indication of this. As for myself, I don’t believe a word of it.

Thursday 18 January

David and Natasha Wilson arrived yesterday and today Margaret Thatcher came. She is full of beans, between Taiwan and the Philippines, and as supportive as ever. I had an hour with David Wilson, who was polite but sceptical. I then gave him an honorary degree at the Chinese University along with Jonathan Spence, one of the greatest historians of China and a professor at Yale. I have read most of his books. We gave a dinner for David and Natasha. Natasha (who sits next to me) has been going around town telling everybody she meets that I’ve screwed everything up, that she agrees with Percy Cradock, and that Lavender and I have been incredibly extravagant in smartening up the house and in particular that it was awful that we got rid of the (ancient) Laura Ashley curtains. She must presumably know that it all comes back to us like a squash ball off the wall. But Lavender had an agreeable evening sitting between David, who was pleasant and easy, and the previous Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie. After dinner, when we were seeing the guests off, Jonathan Spence told me how much he supports everything I’ve been trying to do. That rather makes up for my own difficult evening.

Friday 19 October

Charles Powell told me that he thinks relations with China are improving; Zhou Nan went to lunch at Jardine’s the other day and – though it’s difficult to believe – was positively cheerful. After a discussion on the budget, I had a very long session with two American senators, Dianne Feinstein and John Glenn. Their general worthiness is not matched by brightness and they were very under-briefed on Hong Kong. Senator Feinstein seems to think that she has a personal relationship with Jiang Zemin dating back to the days when they were respectively mayors of San Francisco and Shanghai. She thinks that he is a decent fellow, and if only we could prevail on him to be constructive, everything in Hong Kong would be all right. I gave them a hard hour and a half. Perhaps it will do some good. I then set off on a district visit with Margaret and we went to the Tsing Yi Technical College, where she did a Q and A with the students. We then took her to have a look at the magnificent bridge, which we hope she will open in due course.

Monday 22 January

I had breakfast with Winston Lord, who has been in Hong Kong again over the weekend. He knows the place well. Unlike the American senators, he thinks that Martin Lee is sounding more moderate than in the past but finds some of the members of the Preparatory Committee expressing absolutely appalling views. He remarked on the great difficulty of dealing with China at the moment, when the country is in a state which combines arrogance, self-confidence, scratchiness, nervousness and nationalism all at the same time. He believes that those who ask why we have done this modest amount about democracy late in the day should recognize that we are reacting to the development of a middle class and middle-class values in Hong Kong. Not to have taken the action we have, particularly after Tiananmen, would have been destabilizing. He is obviously worried about stability after 1997, particularly if the Chinese scrap Legco and refuse to talk to the Democrats.

Tuesday 23 January

A first discussion in Exco on the handover ceremony, and later the JLG had an expert meeting on the same subject. The Chinese have clearly dug in. They are still insisting on a small, diplomatic occasion in City Hall and raising all sorts of absurd objections to our own plans for doing something bigger. It’s clear that they want us to leave with the minimum fuss, taking our washing with us, and to organize splendid festivities for themselves on 1 July. I think it is going to be a long slog before we either reach an agreement or go our separate ways. David Wilson has returned to London and Natasha Wilson gone on to see their son in Beijing. We very much look forward to the next visit by Pamela Youde. We have a good discussion about the possibility of a prime ministerial visit, preferably in early March, and the progress we are making on visa-free access. Malcolm is going to see Ken Clarke and Michael Howard this week. If we can get the progress we want, we can ensure that it’s announced at the time of a visit.

In the afternoon I went to see how the strategic sewage disposal programme is getting on. After my years at the Environment Department in London and negotiations on sewage plumes with the European Commission I regard myself as something of an expert on the subject. My officials seem surprised and impressed by my interest in and knowledge about the subject, and Martin Dinham thinks it’s all put on. But it’s for real. It’s the Victorian coming out in me. So no sneering. The work done so far is very impressive. We have ignored Chinese criticisms and ploughed ahead with the work, which really will be completed by the middle of 1997. Perhaps it can be named after me. No bridge, no airport, no tunnel, but a sewage treatment plant. I went back to GH to have a quick drink with the very nice young New York stockbroker who bought me a CD a few years ago when we were in the same shop in Central, to say that not all stockbrokers think I am the devil incarnate.

Thursday 25 January

A productive discussion about our plans for improving temporary housing areas. We are converting some older blocks and trying to spruce up the existing THAs. There will continue to be a need for this sort of housing for the indefinite future, largely because of the number of people still flooding in from China. I talked later with the head of the policy planning department in the German Foreign Ministry. He is very understanding about our position and deeply sceptical about China’s intentions and ability to continue with its mixture of Leninism and unbridled capitalism.

Monday 29 January

Talked to Donald Tsang about his budget. Before announcing it, he is off to Davos to tell them how sound the Hong Kong economy is. We will have budget talks with the Chinese this week. Our aim is to try to delay the next 1997/98 phase of the budget discussion so that as much as possible takes place with the Chief Executive designate. Once the Chinese have got their foot in the door on the budget, we will never get them out of the room.

I met the new Financial Times man, John Ridding, along with the existing correspondent, who’s a friend, Simon Holberton. Simon has become more and more gloomy about Hong Kong as he comes nearer to the end of his posting and thinks there is a great conspiracy to hide what is likely to happen here. The FT is one of the few papers that I take seriously these days.

There were incursions into our waters by Chinese boats over the weekend, which in the end were handled well. But we are a little alarmed, first by what seems to be a tendency to feebleness among the police who had to deal with the Chinese, and second by the fact that at the centre we were kept in the dark for so long about what was happening. The Commissioner gets the point. Overall, we are lucky to have him.

The Preparatory Committee met over the weekend. Nothing much seems to have happened. They got their marching orders and were told to keep quiet. They then went to lots of exercises by the PLA future garrison in Guangdong. The TVB Chinese language television channel ran endless propaganda pictures of the PLA and the English Channel merely referred to ‘anxieties’ over Tiananmen. Perhaps censorship really has arrived in Hong Kong already. The PLA boasted about how well trained the soldiers were, all of them speaking Cantonese and so on. In practice it seemed rather difficult to find one of them who could speak Cantonese and certainly they spoke no English. The exception was one of the two deputy commanders, who was once at the Royal College of Defence Studies in London; the other apparently has connections to one of the regiments that ‘dealt with’ the students in Tiananmen Square. So they seem to have got most angles covered.

Tuesday 30 January

Discussion at Exco about the way that the mechanism for dealing with police complaints operates. We are going to set up the independent complaints body on a statutory basis. The Democrats will probably want us to go a lot further than the police would like. With the exception of C. H. Tung, Exco is in favour of giving the body as much credibility as possible with an independent outsider as chairman.

After lunch I went to the Convention and Exhibition Centre. It really is a spectacular building, and work there is going ahead pretty well, but I have to keep cracking the whip to make sure that it’s finished before 30 June next year. It looks as though the Prime Minister will be coming in early March and I hope he will lay a foundation stone at the centre. It will be one of the greatest modern buildings in the world and certainly most dramatically placed, jutting out into the harbour.

Friday 2 February

The stock market and property markets are beginning to look better with American interest rates having been cut and a lot of money starting to pour into Hong Kong again. In the JLG, Chinese negotiators are trying to bounce us into accepting that once the budget for this year is agreed, cooperation should start on the 1997/98 budget. We are stalling because we don’t want any real discussions on that one until there is a Chief Executive designate. If we let Beijing into the budgetary process in the way they want for 1997/98, the SAR government will never get them out.

I talked to Bob Peirce and Edward Llewellyn about plans for the Prime Minister’s visit. Michael Howard still hasn’t thrown in the towel on visa-free access, but it looks more and more likely that the PM will be coming for a day and a bit at the beginning of March. We have to do a speech for him. Things seem to be going a bit better for him at home.

I’m told that C. H. Tung is desperate to avoid what is being called rather oddly ‘the chalice’, in other words becoming Chief Executive. He is also bothered about how to put over an optimistic message to the Americans when he leads a team of businessmen over to the US shortly. The trouble is that these groups of Hong Kong businessmen talk to American audiences as though there weren’t any problems at all in Hong Kong. At a time when Sino-US relations are starting to get very scratchy, with worries about arms proliferation, human rights, trade, intellectual property and Taiwan, the suggestion that all is well doesn’t go down frightfully convincingly.

Tuesday 6 February

Lavender went to a women’s prison at Tuen Mun, and while she says there is a great deal of overcrowding, she was impressed by the staff and by the job they are doing. About one third of the inmates have drug problems. Meanwhile I went to a Q and A session, organized by RTHK, with about 200 secondary school students. It was very enjoyable, not least because I got questions on a rather wider range of issues than normal, from sex education to euthanasia. A long interview with Graham Hutchings for the Daily Telegraph during which I don’t say anything particularly new but probably say rather too much. I note that the Chinese seem to have some difficulty in comprehending the nature of a free society and that they shouldn’t just listen in Hong Kong to billionaires, who are principally interested in remaining billionaires. Also the tendency of businessmen in Hong Kong, who want passports to a free society for themselves, and yet don’t seem to bother about Hong Kong remaining a free society itself. Hutchings asks good questions and perhaps foolishly I say what I think.

David Wright has just been staying here with his wife on his way through to Tokyo and he has been followed today by Andrew Burns, the new deputy secretary covering Hong Kong, who has just taken over from him. Edward Oakden is also here with a team from No. 10, looking at the Prime Minister’s itinerary for his Hong Kong visit. He wants to spend a day with me at Fanling.

Thursday 8 February

The Hutchings interview makes waves in Hong Kong among my normal critics but – a reminder that we have to play to several audiences – there is a very helpful and supportive editorial in the Telegraph. Following my question session with students the other day, I made a speech today at Shatin College, once again with excellent questions.

Saturday 10 February

The Governor of Macau and his wife are paying a weekend visit but Lavender and I had to dash to the Prince of Wales Hospital when we heard about an awful tragedy involving schoolchildren who were out on a Duke of Edinburgh’s Award trek in the Pat Sin Leng hills when they were engulfed by a hill fire. Three schoolchildren and one teacher have been burnt to death and there are a lot of awful burns injuries and smoke inhalation problems. Once again it is difficult to know what you can say to parents and other relations when the prognosis for so many of their children is so bad. There’s more bad news in London as well. There has been a bomb in the city which will presumably halt the Northern Irish peace process for a time.

Sunday 11 February

Lunch with the French Foreign Minister and a group of his officials. They have just been in Beijing. From what they say it doesn’t appear that they have been much help over Hong Kong, which is the usual European story. I also asked him if France could take more of the asylum seekers from China that we have got at present in Hong Kong. Since Tiananmen we have dealt with over 190. Most have gone on to the US, quite a few to the UK, and (to be fair) to France too, which comes next on the list.

Friday 16 February

We have had to spend all too much time this week lobbying Legco members to support us in a vote on the Labour Importation Scheme. We eventually won it with a reasonably comfortable majority. We have also won a vote on the Provident Fund. Hard work all round but good results. Also lots more meetings on the Prime Minister’s visit and a visit to Island School to find out how to complete UCAS forms. At another meeting on the handover we have agreed to put Stephen Lam^fn13 in charge of arrangements.

Saturday 17 February

A week’s holiday for the Chinese New Year has begun. It is bitterly cold, the coldest Chinese New Year for 46 years in Hong Kong. A few old people, some living on the street and some living on their own, have allegedly died of hypothermia. We have increased spending on services for the elderly a great deal in the last three or four years and have been denounced for welfarism for doing so. But there is still much more to do, even assuming that Hong Kong will not be as cold as this every year.

Sunday 18–Tuesday 20 February

The Husseys are visiting us again which reminds us that back home there is an approaching debate on the Scott report, with a few Conservatives threatening to vote against clearing Lady Sue Hussey’s brother, William Waldegrave, and Nick Lyell. This is deranged troublemaking, but is plainly very worrying for William and Nick. Lavender and I returned to the hospital to visit the children who were burnt in the fire and their families. Shelley Lau, who is the regional secretary looking after community relations, has done a great job helping to care for them. She is a cheerful, energetic woman and what she has done goes well beyond what might have been expected. Lavender has now gone back for a few days to London to see Kate and Laura.

Monday 26 February

A terrible own goal by the NCNA, who have announced – though it should have nothing to do with them – that it is not suitable for the Lutheran Federation to have its conference (world jamboree) in Hong Kong in the middle of July 1997. Freedom of religion? High degree of autonomy? Et cetera et cetera. The media stuck it to them – the NCNA that is, not the Lutherans.

It looks as though we are making good progress in London towards acceptance of visa-free access for SAR passport holders, and having read his briefing on ethnic minorities and war widows the Prime Minister is keen to do something about them too. Naturally the Home Secretary is digging in and even trying to hedge the visa-free decision with lots of qualifications. The idea is that John should announce this decision when he is in Hong Kong. We are trying to keep it all under wraps until then.

We have now received post-mortems on the elderly who allegedly died of hypothermia during the cold spell over the Chinese New Year. It appears that nobody at all died of hypothermia and that the number of deaths for the week was about average for this time of year. We actually have quite a good story to tell about improving services for the elderly but we need to get it across better in a more coordinated way. I wouldn’t dream of mentioning it, but there doesn’t seem much sign of Confucian values in the lack of neighbourly help for old people living on their own. What we do of course get is a lot of ‘something must be done’ noise about the government recruiting more social workers.

Tuesday 27 February

There is no Exco because of the holiday, but I had a very good discussion with Rosanna Wong about the Prime Minister’s visit, housing policy and on how we can deal better and with greater sensitivity with the Democrats and other legislators.

Wednesday 28 February

A visit to the new airport site. It’s mind-blowing how much has been achieved over the past three years despite all the sniping from the Chinese. If we had less obstruction from them, we could of course open it before the handover. They would hate that, so instead it will be opened in 1998 by some aged communist hack who will take all the credit.

Thursday 29 February

We’ve been told that the Prime Minister, who has now arrived in Bangkok for the ASEM [Asia–Europe Meeting], has added an excellent paragraph to the Hong Kong speech draft we sent him (mostly written by Bob and Edward) saying that the UK will continue to have a moral commitment to Hong Kong after 1997, and that if China breaches the Joint Declaration, Britain will not only take it up on its own but also raise it with the rest of the international community. Bravo!

I saw the Luxembourg Prime Minister, Claude Juncker, who has been in Beijing, again on his way to the ASEM. When talking to Chinese leaders he was very vigorous on Hong Kong’s behalf, arguing against the abolition of Legco. This matters because Luxembourg will have the presidency of the EU in the second half of 1997, so he is taking a particular interest in our affairs. Back in London this week, two or three delegations of Legco members are seeing British ministers who have just about managed to keep the lid on the visa-free access decision. There has also been a visit to London by the Chinese trade minister with claims that it will result in £2 billion of trade for Britain. We shall see.

Martin Lee has had a predictable ‘ships passing in the night’ sort of meeting with Michael Heseltine. Martin came out denouncing Britain for selling Hong Kong down the river for better trade with China. Michael must have been understandably a bit galled by this. It may be in a sense what he would like to have done and he certainly feels we have missed commercial opportunities in China because of Hong Kong. Anyway, I hope he can take some satisfaction from the trade minister’s visit if it really does produce what has been promised (unlikely though that may be). The Prime Minister has seen Li Peng in the margins of the Bangkok meeting. Nothing much seems to have emerged. It was perfectly civil. He raised Legco and the Bill of Rights and got nowhere. Li said that he wouldn’t send civil servants to run Hong Kong or raise taxes here. Of course not. He also said that he recognized the importance of the appointment of the right person as Chief Executive.

Friday 1 March

There is a very United Front organization called the Better Hong Kong Tomorrow Foundation. It is close to C. H. Tung. Its director has just given an interview to USA Today saying that all that people in Hong Kong care about is making money and that nobody had heard about democracy until I came along. The article notes of course that all the tycoons who sounded off with similar sentiments during the interview had foreign passports. This is not going to be very helpful just before C. H. goes off with other local businessmen for the annual US–Hong Kong business conference.

At a meeting on the handover, we decide that we will move ahead gently and quietly with our own arrangements, hoping that the Chinese will come in at some stage and that we can avoid a row. I doubt whether this will be possible but we’ve obviously got to start thinking about how to manage the handover sooner rather than later.

Saturday 2 March

Lavender has come home. I telephoned Martin Lee to take him to task for denouncing the Prime Minister for saying a number of things which have been made up, perhaps by Martin’s research assistant. I also take him to task for apparently advocating to the Foreign Secretary what sounded very much like secret deals with China rather than ‘Patten-style’ politics. I pointed out to him that it will start to look a bit odd if people can claim that I am being more democratic than the Democratic Party. He is a brave man and on the right side of the biggest events, but I do very often question his political judgement.

Sunday 3 March

The Prime Minister arrived last night. He is extremely tired, which is not surprising. He has had a hell of a week, including the Anglo-Irish summit and the debate on the Scott Report, which, thank God, went just about all right, though the vote was narrow. After all that he had the flight to Bangkok and the summit there with lots of side meetings. He must have the constitution of an ox. He was so tired that he had difficulty going off to bed. We are at Fanling and Lavender rustles up a cheese sandwich which he devours with a glass of whisky before tottering off to bed at about 2am.

After breakfast and a long chat on the terrace, including his very nice Foreign Office private secretary, John Holmes (the only other person with him is his private detective), we talked a bit about the current issues in Hong Kong before he went off to read his briefs. After lunch we took him to see the new bridge and the airport. He was as impressed by both these projects as everybody else is. It really is a great tribute to Hong Kong that we have been able to do so much against a background of trouble-making from China. He is up to speed on all our issues, as I would have expected. He went to a reception organized by Francis Cornish for businessmen in the evening and I agreed to do a lobby briefing for the journalists who are travelling with him. I give them a good talk about Hong Kong and then they asked to go on the record on my own prospects. I give them the usual routine – I don’t think about a future job while I am still doing a present one. For example, when I was Environment Secretary I didn’t think about what I would be doing afterwards. I have got my hands full until 30 June 1997. I’m not ruling anything out and – cliché coming up – I’m not ruling anything in. It would be ridiculous for me to be going around saying that I wanted to be a European Commissioner or to do some other international jobs (though I would). I’m still interested in political issues. I have been in politics since I was 21. They also asked me off the record about Europe and I repeated my familiar line about enlargement mattering more than the single European currency. Kerry said that they went away quite cheerfully but that there was a lot of muttering that I should be back in British politics.

We gave a big dinner for John tonight. There were over 170 people, a piper outside and Chinese musicians in the room. John and I both made substance-free speeches, though he emphatically underlined his own commitment and that of the government to Hong Kong. Everyone seemed to enjoy it and to behave pretty well, though there are some funny stories that I heard later in the evening. Jonathan Mirsky was at the same table as the pro-Beijing businessman Paul Cheng, who spent most of the evening denouncing democracy. Jonathan had to leave at one point in order to avoid throwing a fit or a punch!

Monday 4 March

A killer of a day for the Prime Minister but throughout he overwhelmed the scepticism about his visit, about what he can do or say about the future, with a bravura display of competence and decency. He started by laying a foundation stone at the magnificent extension to the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre and then came back for an excellent meeting with Exco. He clearly impressed them with his conviction and his sincerity. More surprisingly, it was the same with about 40 Legco members who had a meeting with him in our dining room. He answered questions on Vietnamese migrants, breaches of the Joint Declaration, the Preparatory Committee, the Bill of Rights and Hong Kong residents detained in other countries. Emily was very forceful but extremely courteous as well. Martin Lee was very polite and hands over the bet that he lost with Malcolm Rifkind over visa-free access which John tells them about. All in all it’s an excellent session. On Vietnamese migrants he explained that he had a meeting with the Vietnamese Prime Minister in Bangkok and that officials are going to Vietnam in April to prepare the way for a visit by Jeremy Hanley the following month so that we can try to expedite matters. He surprised with the announcement on visa-free access, ditto on the ethnic minorities – we are giving them a guarantee that if they come under pressure to leave they will be allowed into Britain – and passports for war widows. He also surprised with the strength of his commitment to Hong Kong and to taking whatever action is required if the Chinese breach the Joint Declaration.

After seeing an old veteran, Jack Edwards, who was thrilled by the announcement on war widows (on which he has been campaigning for years), he went off to make a speech to the Chambers of Commerce which went extremely well and was interrupted by applause several times. A lot of the best bits, underlining our continuing commitment to Hong Kong and our determination to stand up for the Joint Declaration, have been added by him and his staff, which makes it all the more satisfactory. After this, we visited Shatin, where we were mobbed at a school and in a shopping centre. Some of the British press were there and are obviously impressed. People in the crowd are shouting out, ‘thanks for the visas’ – yet another demonstration that we are not entirely regarded as colonial oppressors here.

He came back to the Government Secretariat and after a briefing in GH we had the last press conference. This is of course the sort of occasion when all the gains can be frittered away. But he didn’t put a foot wrong. I’m reminded why I like and admire him so much. He just doesn’t have as much self-confidence as he should have and asks too often how he is doing. The answer is ‘bloody well’. He is a terrifically likeable man, genuinely good if given half a chance, and he has that huge ability – he wouldn’t be flattered by the comparison with Bill Clinton – to radiate sympathy. I took him off to the airport for his next flight to Seoul and went home for an early night. It has been one of my happiest days in Hong Kong, indeed in politics.

Tuesday 5 March

There’s a very good press for the Prime Minister, which is almost unheard of in Hong Kong. There is a general recognition, first, that he has gone as far as or further than people thought possible on nationality issues, and second, that his commitment to Hong Kong is rock solid. Given how difficult it is for a British minister to get in and out of Hong Kong without disastrous trouble, he really has done exceptionally well. The other press story which is played back from the British press is that I am going back to UK politics. It’s crazy but I suppose inevitable and conceivably even mildly flattering. I couldn’t have completely ruled out a return to British politics, but it’s difficult to get the balance right.

Exco was brief; everyone seems very pleased about John’s visit. There was a short discussion about the Chinese threats to Taiwan, which have started to cause anxiety. C. H. Tung kept very quiet. We talked about Donald Tsang’s budget. I think it will get a good reception, not least because it’s the first budget presented by a local official. My former private secretary, Bowen Leung, is going off to run a liaison office for us in Beijing. Anson and I discuss how he can best do this job using his huge charm. I am starting to plan programmes for North America and London in the autumn. The CBI have asked me to talk to them. I think I should do this. But it will probably prompt more ‘Patten bombshell’ headlines.

Wednesday 6 March

In the afternoon I went to Wong Tai Sin and got a tremendous reception, which is, once again, good for morale. If it had been an election and we had won Shatin by 25,000, we would have won Wong Tai Sin by at least 50,000! On the way back to GH, we heard in the car from Kerry that the Prime Minister has given an interview to Robin Oakley on the plane back from Seoul for the Today programme. He said how much he hopes I will go back to British politics, how sad it was that I was defeated in Bath, and how I am one of those who would be among possible successors if I were to return. By the time we get back to the office the lines were red-hot – ‘Major sees Patten as heir’, et cetera. One snag is that I don’t think anybody has convinced the 1922 Committee of this! We went to a parents’ evening at Island School. No surprise that Alice is doing very well.

Thursday 7 March

A long meeting with Lee Wing-tat, a Democrat in Legco who is certainly on the more responsible wing of the party. He has some interesting thoughts on reforming the Housing Authority. It’s very important that his colleagues listen to his particular brand of sensible politics and I don’t only say that because he told me that he has read my book The Tory Case. I’m picking up that quite a few who claim to be close to Beijing – and even a few in the civil service – are going around saying how important it is that we don’t start criticizing China if Legco is dismantled and the Bill of Rights is gutted.

There is apparently a right-wing reaction in some papers back home to all the speculation about my return to British politics. I’ve taken the opportunity of an interview with the Guardian to bash all this guff over the head and at the same time to bash the right wing of the Conservative Party. After Lee Wing-tat, I saw Frederick Fung, who is another legislator close to the Democrats and who has chosen to join the Preparatory Committee. He told me that their next task will be to endorse the proposals for a provisional Legco. He is obviously finding his first experience of working with Chinese officials rather daunting. Any idea that the Preparatory Committee can reach its own conclusions is for the birds. I guess this will also be true of the selection committee for the Chief Executive designate when it is chosen. We really shouldn’t allow ourselves to get sucked into a process which will be anything but democratic.

Monday 11 March

We have had some tidying up to do after the Prime Minister’s visit and Donald’s budget, which everyone appears to agree was a very clever one – cautious but generous. China seems to be stepping up the pressure on Taiwan and the Hang Seng Index is sliding. Taiwan trouble will make our lobbying for MFN in Washington more difficult. I discussed our next big visit with Francis Cornish; Michael Heseltine is going to China again in May and coming to stay with us afterwards. I imagine there will be lots of comparisons drawn between his positions and the Prime Minister’s. At Exco Bob gave an assessment of the situation in Taiwan. He said that all the evidence suggests the Chinese action is substantially reducing support for unification. C. H. Tung says that everyone should recognize the strength of nationalist feeling in China. We need to sort these things out peacefully, and the fact that Taiwan is being intimidated by China is neither here nor there for a lot of the business community. It is American action in sending carriers to the area which is regarded as the provocation. You do wonder sometimes why his family ever got American passports.

Wednesday 13 March

I have a morning preparing speeches for my visit to the UK in April. I’m doing one at the Bank of England on the Asian miracle (or lack of same) and another on ‘Asian values’. Wise George Shultz came in again and articulated the view that when you mix up trade and politics or human rights issues, you finish by achieving nothing on any of them. It’s only the Chinese who effectively tangle trade and politics and get the rest of the world dancing to their tune. The French and the Germans are trying to do a deal with China to avoid Paris and Berlin supporting the UN resolution on human rights in Geneva. There’s lots of rubbish being talked about better ways of securing human rights improvements being possible – this in the week that Amnesty International has produced a devastating report on Chinese human rights. The French are concerned about Li Peng’s visit to France in April and the Germans are as ever only bothered about trade. They tried to hijack the Prime Minister in Bangkok but to no avail. Now they are pressing for talks with China but the Chinese, thank heavens, aren’t giving an inch.

Friday 15 March

In the talks about next year’s budget, the Chinese are trying to hold out as long as possible rather than accept that the negotiations will be with the Chief Executive designate. They want a foot in the door so badly. We have accepted that there should be a through budget; it wouldn’t make much sense to have a budget for three months and then another for nine. But I do want us to be negotiating with the Chief Executive designate not with Beijing.

Monday 18 March

Taiwan continues to dominate the news. I saw Peter Tarnoff, the US Under Secretary of State for political affairs, who was understandably gloomy about MFN given Chinese behaviour. Tom Phillips, the UK’s political counsellor at our embassy in Washington, who does a lot of our legwork on Hong Kong there, also thinks that this year the hill on MFN is going to be more difficult to climb. Another American visitor, Robert Rubin, reckons it doesn’t help that the Chinese leaders seem to have convinced themselves that the MFN argument is simply a regular Washington ceremony. He also thinks that the markets would take a pretty dim view of restrictions on human rights or democratic accountability in Hong Kong. It would eventually affect confidence and would certainly have some influence on the attitudes of the potential employees of multinationals in the city. After my meeting with Rubin, Richard Muller told me that C.H. and other businessmen who have just been in Washington have been begging the Americans not to get too interested or interfere in Hong Kong’s affairs before or after 1997. Paul Volcker has pressed hard on this. Did they really mean that they didn’t want the Americans to take an interest in their well-being after 1997? That appeared to be the message.

Thursday 21 March

It seems as though Jardine’s think they have achieved some sort of modus vivendi with the regulator, thanks to a legal opinion they have which says that they are in effect clear of the Security and Futures Commission’s jurisdiction. If this stops Henry Keswick wandering around saying that I’ve failed to defend British interests in Hong Kong (in other words I haven’t done whatever he wants), and if it means that we no longer have to spend so much time on this issue, then so be it. At least we haven’t put ourselves in the embarrassing position of intervening in the regulator’s business on behalf of Keswick. I have never understood why he has thought this would be good for him, his firm or Hong Kong.

I’ve added to my remarks on a provisional Legco, challenging existing legislators who are on the Preparatory Committee to make it clear that they wouldn’t serve on a provisional body unless all their fellow Legco members could do so as well. There is a cut-off date for people getting BNO [British National Overseas] passports by the end of the month and huge queues have been forming outside the immigration department. We’re going to try to find some ways of speeding things up.

Sunday 24 March

Over the weekend Lavender and I went on a lovely two-day walk on Lantau with Francis and Jane Cornish. It is a hard hike through beautiful scenery. We came back this evening to the news of the Preparatory Committee work. They voted 148 to 1 in favour of winding up Legco and setting up a provisional legislature. The one dissenting vote was Frederick Fung. He has been told that for voting against, he will be excluded from the selection committee and the provisional Legco itself. The community gets the message! What a mess: democracy with Chinese communist characteristics.

Monday 25 March

At a meeting with Donald and Anson, she made clear that she thinks that the best thing a new Chief Executive could do will be to confirm that everyone in the civil service would transit 1997. We had a delicious dinner with Donald and his wife, Selina, almost entirely beautifully cooked fish.

Tuesday 26 March

I saw the director general of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission who wants us to raise with the Chinese the position of the cemeteries after 1997. I also talked to Yeung Sum^fn14 in my quest to encourage the Democrats to behave as responsibly as possible, which is in their own interests. He is supportive on the budget, though he wants us to make some promises about social security rates for the elderly next year. There are rumours, sourced to a briefing that Li Peng is said to have given to journalists on an unattributable basis, saying that all civil servants will have to agree to support the provisional Legco once it is established. He is also said to be very cross that the Prime Minister’s visit and his comments while he was here demonstrate that I’m not going to simply roll over and die. Rosanna Wong is concerned about the threats to the civil service which she suggests show the Chinese determination to try to isolate me – again. Anson is about to make a second speech within a week criticizing the closing down of the existing Legco and the establishment of a provisional legislature. She has not consulted me about either of these speeches. The idea that I force her or anybody else to speak out on these matters is completely absurd. I cannot imagine obliging Anson to do anything she didn’t want to do. She feels particularly passionately about the integrity of the civil service, which she rightly thinks is one of the mainstays of Hong Kong’s success and values.

Thursday 28 March

Jan Morris is in town preparing the final edition of her terrific book on Hong Kong. She came to talk to me and I have the impression that her last chapter now will suggest that the British tried near the very end to do something about democracy, for which some thanks are in order, but this should have been done much earlier. A wise woman, she’s right about that as about so much else.

Back home the mad cow row with Britain and Europe has been rumbling away. There is an assumption that I will be ordered not to do anything about British beef. But since there is now a global ban on its sale by the EU, I shoot the media’s cow and stop its purchase here while pointing out that there shouldn’t be any real health worries.

Friday 29 March

Looking back on the previous few days, it seems to me that this has been a very bad week for Hong Kong. After the Taiwanese elections last weekend, when President Lee Teng-hui did extremely well partly because of the threats from Beijing, the CCP seemed to harden its line right across the board. The sight of democracy flowering in Taiwan while Chinese officials announced its imminent demise in Hong Kong left a nasty taste in many mouths. The same has been true of the pressure put on civil servants. Anson is going to see all senior officials on Sunday morning. The press is very supportive of her. She goes on speaking out, even though lots of her friends are telling her to keep her head down. (‘If only you would keep quiet you could carry on being Chief Secretary after 1997, or even perhaps Chief Executive.’) She thinks that C.H. is now a shoo-in. There is also some sort of deal in the offing under which Cathay will sign up to selling off a big stake in Dragonair to CNAC for a sweetheart price in the hope that they will then be allowed to carry on without any interference. I wonder. There doesn’t seem to have been any agreement with CNAC to drop their application to operate an airline from Hong Kong, challenging Cathay themselves on their main routes The words salami slicing come to mind. There’s also been a terrible meeting in the JLG about the handover ceremony, with the Chinese, among other things, denying that there was any reason for inviting foreign visitors and insisting on having joint vetting of journalists. Bad, bad, bad. At the rugby Sevens at the weekend, the Governor of Macau tells me that he and his colleagues there are getting rather depressed about the hardening of Chinese positions on their front too. Jung Chang and her husband, Jon Halliday, are staying with us. They tell me that at least 50% of the costs of the Communist Party in the Yan’an years came from the sale of opium.

The South China Morning Post is now trying a new tack editorially. Their argument used to be that we weren’t standing up for Hong Kong. Now they have started to say that maybe John Major and I did try at the last moment to stand up for the territory but all it has demonstrated is that there’s nothing really we can do. We should apparently just hope that China doesn’t insist on British influence being stamped out even before 1997.

Monday 1 April

Huge numbers of people have been queuing up for their passports. We dealt with about 100,000 over the weekend, which makes 180,000 in the last week. There was a small punch-up over queue jumping. This immediately resulted in pictures being flashed around the world about riots and the queues for British passports. This is just an example of the sort of thing that Hong Kong can expect as it receives more sceptical public attention over the coming 15 months.

This morning we looked at the lists that we’ve had so far from Beijing about what they want us to do to help the Preparatory Committee. Some of the proposals are pretty blameless. Others are quite impossible – for example, providing facilities for the provisional legislature. One immediate conclusion is that since it’s taken since last October for the Preparatory Committee to come forward with any ideas, there is no need for us to rush our response. We will let them have it sometime after Easter. In the meantime, we will speed up plans to help the officials from China who are coming to the Preparatory Committee meetings in Hong Kong after Easter, which are allegedly going to take soundings about membership of the Selection Committee and related matters.

It looks as though we will have no real difficulty getting Legco to agree the budget this week. How people used to worry that we wouldn’t get the budget through this close to the handover! I talked to Martin Lee about the importance of him speaking up for unconditional MFN renewal when he is in Washington next, and that it will be used against the Democrats if it looks as though they are advocating measures which would harm Hong Kong jobs and prosperity.

Wednesday 3–Tuesday 9 April

Alice has already gone off to Nepal with the school, so when Lavender and I set off for London for Easter and lots of speeches back home, we had only the dogs to bid farewell to. We flew to London overnight and then dashed to Gatwick to meet Kate and Laura there and catch a plane to Toulouse. We had a wonderful week over Easter at Monbretal. The weather was as warm as late May or early June in England. Everything looks fine, particularly our new gates, shutters and outdoor stone table. We walked, bought bicycles, cycled, shopped, ate, gardened, read and thoroughly enjoy our time together; the house, the garden and the surrounding countryside all live up to my fantasies about them.

Wednesday 10 April

Back to London. I had a meeting with the Prime Minister in the afternoon. He was as supportive as ever and wonders what more we can do to underline Britain’s continuing commitment to Hong Kong. He was a little concerned in case Michael Heseltine’s trade jamboree in May in China, his second effort to drum up business, should lead to an increase in worries that we are really going to sell Hong Kong out for Britain’s commercial interests. I made a speech in the City of London on the Asian miracle, such as it is, and the following day spoke at the Royal Society of Arts on Asian values. I had two talks to Eddie George, the Governor of the Bank of England, about Hong Kong risk, and was assured by him that the Bank is handling the issue very sensitively. Jeremy Hanley has had a good visit to Vietnam following the Prime Minister’s discussions with his opposite number at the Bangkok summit.

Saturday 13 April

A brief visit to Northern Ireland to support an umbrella organization for charities there. I spoke at the Institute of Directors annual dinner in the evening. It was encouraging to see the progress Northern Ireland has made, particularly the developments in Belfast. All rather nostalgic for us both. Lavender used to come regularly when I was a junior minister there. We said goodbye to Kate and Laura and left for Hong Kong tonight.

Monday 15 April

There has been quite a fuss while I’ve been away about some slightly rum remarks made by Raymond Chi’en. He opined for no very good reason that there was a legal base for a provisional legislature. The media have of course raised questions about collective responsibility in Exco, and Dennis Chang has written a couple of excellent pieces in the papers raising serious question marks about the legitimacy of the provisional Legco. Jimmy McGregor wants a discussion about collective responsibility and there is a general wish for a discussion about the sort of interim Legco which the Chinese want to appoint.

As luck would have it, Lu Ping is in town this week to work with the Preparatory Committee. They are all behaving worse and worse during what is supposed to be a week taking soundings in Hong Kong and have been completely put off their stride by a few demonstrators who have got a lot of attention. They have also refused to see some teachers because the delegation included pro-democracy legislators. They shuffle in and out of meetings by the back door. Clearly, they encourage people’s worst fears and appear to confirm that consultation is a farce. They are being obliged to take the consequences for what they want us to do, namely to fix the legislature.

While I was away Peter Mandelson came to Hong Kong and has written me a letter which, while charming on the surface, bristles with his own political agenda. He talks about sympathizing with me for being beleaguered and about my need to have an intermediary. Presumably he doesn’t mean like him. I must say I don’t feel particularly beleaguered, but if Lu Ping felt anything I imagine that he might.

The Garel-Joneses are staying for a week (Tristan is here with UBS [bank], to whom I’m going to speak later in the week) and Richard Needham came to dinner with his wife, Sissie. Quite like old times. Tristan and I even have an argument about Napoleon … again. He is a Bonapartist at heart.

Tuesday 16 April

At Exco this morning I went through the arguments about the legislature and the provisional one. There is only one Legco in Hong Kong; that remains the case until June 1997. A provisional Legco isn’t mentioned in the Joint Declaration or the Basic Law and can’t have any constitutional position before June 1997. Whether or not it has any position after that is for the Chinese to justify. I note that we have applied the rule of collective responsibility with some generosity over the last years (so didn’t for example take too tyrannical a view of Raymond Ch’ien’s recent remarks), and I intend to do so until the handover, since I regard it as important to have a broadly based Exco. After a long discussion, everyone seems to go along with what I have said. I think there is a general feeling of relief that we have got the issue out of the way.

We invited to GH the two Hong Kong Chinese men whose case I raised when I was in the Philippines. They spent 4½ years in prison before their conviction for drug trafficking was overturned. They were part of a tour party in which some Malaysians were caught carrying drugs and were wrongly accused by association. We are trying to ensure that they get the right help after this dreadful experience.

Thursday 18 April

At a Q+A session with Legco I took much the same line that I did in Exco with lots of questions about the work of the Preparatory Committee, the provisional Legco and the exclusion of some people from any pretence of consultation. Anson has had dinner with Lu Ping and with Zhou Nan. It was perfectly cordial apparently, but the Beijing duo didn’t give any ground at all. Lu Ping still seems determined to set up the provisional Legco before the handover even though it’s clearly not needed in practice. I suspect that they want to get it established, hopefully with our connivance, so as to avoid the rumpus that will be caused after 30 June. They are obviously nervous about losing control, which is probably what motivates many of their actions. Anson has been invited to Beijing next week. We hope she will see some other senior officials. The CJ has also been invited.

Saturday 20 April

Suffering from flu, I had a call from Malcolm Rifkind. He is about to have a meeting with Qian. Some of his officials want him to start haggling about the membership of the provisional Legco and the date – as late as possible – when it might start work. I think this would be very unwise. We have a very clear line at the moment and have to stick to it. Once we start to fudge things, the Chinese will leak what we are up to and anyway won’t take any notice of what we are saying. I feel strongly that we mustn’t have our fingerprints all over the establishment of the provisional body. Malcolm doesn’t need much persuasion. At his meeting he speaks up very well for us and bluntly denies Qian’s claim that I encouraged the demonstrations against the Preparatory Committee. Qian gives lots of assurances about Britain being sovereign until 30 June 1997, about the civil service being politically neutral, and about being keen to make progress on the handover ceremony. Maybe they have absorbed the suggestions that I have been making that if there isn’t any agreement on a handover ceremony, we shall go our own way.

Monday 22 April

We are starting to help prepare for Anson’s visit to Beijing, when she will talk about the sort of cooperation we are ready to provide to the Preparatory Committee and the Chief Executive designate, and the unnecessary and damaging establishment of a provisional Legco. I’m also starting to get ready for my forthcoming visit to America and Canada. Kerry has wisely noted that unless I continue to speak out fairly clearly about Beijing’s behaviour, the community will become very nervous and be in danger of falling apart. He thinks that what is required is a continuing show of strong leadership.

Tuesday 23 April

I talked to the American Chamber of Commerce about lobbying on MFN. Martin Lee is at present in the United States and being pursued everywhere he goes by representatives of the Better Hong Kong Tomorrow Foundation, doubtless doing Hong Kong’s image huge damage. They do no favours to Hong Kong businessmen in the USA. Martin on the other hand is saying just the right things about MFN and is getting a very good response.

Friday 26 April

After discussing whether or not the Chinese are going to try to bully civil servants into ‘coming over’, the Ad Hoc group briefly reviewed the debate yesterday in the House of Lords. It didn’t go too badly. Margaret Thatcher made a strong speech and there were a number of other supportive ones. On the other hand, David Wilson made a surprisingly feline attack – the importance of quiet diplomacy, of not shooting from the hip, of working closely with China, of being pragmatic not least in relation to the provisional Legco. Who on earth could he have been thinking about? I resolve even more strongly not to say anything publicly about him.

At lunchtime, I gave a speech to the General Chamber of Commerce about MFN. I say what an excellent job Martin Lee has been doing in arguing for unconditional MFN renewal, and that it is particularly important he has been saying this because of his high credibility in the US. You could, as they say, hear a pin drop. Anson’s meetings with leaders in Beijing seem to have gone well, only becoming frosty when she set out our position on the provisional Legco. She got lots of assurances about China’s determination not to create a second power centre.

Monday 29 April

Robin Cook arrived today. He seemed a bit user-unfriendly when he arrived but certainly thawed out during the day. We had a good working lunch and he asked all the right questions. In the afternoon we went together to Wan Chai and were mobbed in a teahouse where we had dim sum. It was quite good for him to have the opportunity of seeing the colonial oppressor going about oppressing. I also did an interview with Dominic Ziegler for the Economist. They are going to do an editorial on the importance of international support for Hong Kong. At dinner in the evening we had a passionate and lively discussion with lots of different political figures which was also very well behaved.

Tuesday 30 April

Robin Cook had breakfast with Martin Barrow and the executive committee of the General Chamber of Commerce, including Paul Cheng. Apparently Cheng said that if Britain will sort out ‘this Emily Lau business’, then China will give us a decent handover. I bet that went down big with Robin Cook. He asked me whether I think that Tony Blair should come to Hong Kong and China at a reasonably early date. I said that I could understand why he might want to do this – Hong Kong is going to be an early item on Labour’s agenda if they win the election. But it seems to me that it would be pretty high-risk stuff. He would get asked endless ‘what if?’ questions. As Govenor of Hong Kong I would love to see him, but if I were his political adviser, I would suggest that he should go to India or somewhere where the downside and the risks were rather less obvious.

Wednesday 1–Saturday 11 May

Canada and the United States. I did big lunches and dinners with speeches, 1200 people in Vancouver and 600 in Toronto. I saw the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister and other ministers. They were all sympathetic but obviously conscious of the potential impact of 100,000 Canadian citizens in Hong Kong suddenly arriving on their doorstep in 1997. I pressed them on visa-free access for SAR passport holders. They seemed to concede the point in principle while recognizing that some of the details would have to be worked out. Axworthy [Foreign Minister] is more interested in human rights than Chrétien [Prime Minister]. With both of them, and indeed more generally, it isn’t always easy to tread the narrow line between optimism and pessimism.

We then went on to New York, Washington and Seattle. Just to remind myself in future of how hard I worked and what access a retiring colonial Governor could get, I will record most of those that I saw and most of my speaking and interview engagements. In New York I spoke to the Council on Foreign Relations, the US China Trade Committee, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time and Newsweek. In Washington I spoke to the Heritage Foundation, the National Press Club, the Oxford and Cambridge annual dinner (at the latter, to Lavender’s relief, some new jokes). And I saw the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of Commerce, chairman of the National Security Council, chairman of the National Economic Council, and most of the leaders in the Senate and the House of Representatives. I also spoke to the Washington Post and Washington Times and the Freedom Forum. Lavender and I had a dinner at the embassy, where the Kerrs were marvellous hosts. So there! A confession: there were one or two other highlights, a fantastic concert by Jessye Norman in New York and a visit to an exhibition of treasures from the Palace Museum in Taipei, including some fantastic bronzes.

A few thoughts:

1. There is huge antipathy to China, much greater than last time I was here in America. It’s a result of Taiwan, the treatment of dissidents, Tibet, intellectual property theft, threats to Hong Kong, weapons proliferation and so on. This spills over into views about Hong Kong. Everyone is very pessimistic about the prospect of democracy and human rights. People routinely ask what will be the outcome when Beijing controls the Chief Executive, the Legco and the courts. Many assume that Martin Lee and his colleagues will fetch up in the jug.

2. We had astonishing access, very big turnouts at meetings and there was great interest in the message. Last time I was in Washington I recorded that I didn’t think that we would ever be able to pull off a trip like that again. But this time we did even better.

3. On MFN, I made clear that I wasn’t there as a representative of China. I was speaking for Hong Kong. Ending MFN would hurt Hong Kong at a sensitive time. It was more credible because of the fact that I am not seen as a spokesman for China and because Martin Lee was saying exactly the same thing only a few weeks ago.

4. Everyone seems to be thrashing about trying to find some way to deal with China. I think there is a general recognition that removing MFN would be a very crude weapon, so crude that nobody will ever really use it. It’s the unwieldy focus for every resentment about China. There is a lot of feeling that if America takes a strong line on anything with China, Europe will try to undercut it to get trade benefits. But I was told that, despite the rows and the rhetoric, US exports to China had increased in 1995 faster than the volume of imports for the first time in years.

5. I said that America should show its interest in Hong Kong by speaking up in private and in public and by not allowing the territory to be swallowed up in general China issues. I repeated over and over that Hong Kong has been a bridge between communist China and the rest of the world and that the way Beijing handled the territory in the next few years will go right to the heart of the sort of issues which would determine what sort of country China was and would become.

6. President Clinton made it perfectly clear that if or when he got a second term, he would give priority to trying to establish a better relationship with China, but not by giving up the assertion of the importance of human rights and liberal values.

It was a really punishing schedule. If anything like this happens again I need to be a bit fitter. Presumably (down vanity!) some of the access and the turnouts were a result of people knowing that I’m not a complete pudding. We returned via Seattle, taking an inaugural Cathay flight on a Boeing 777. It was nice to have a morning in Seattle shopping, not least at my favourite bookshop, Elliott Bay.

Sunday 12 May

Back to Hong Kong in time for my birthday and a magnificently confected row. From the time I arrived at the airport, where there was a demonstration organized by the NCNA, it was alleged that I had been internationalizing Hong Kong and badmouthing it. Being accused of internationalizing Hong Kong is a bit like being accused of localizing a parish council. Moreover, it’s interesting that when you are dealing with the consequences of China’s behaviour over Hong Kong, you are accused of doing the damage which Chinese actions have actually done. The stick which is most regularly used to beat me is an article in Newsweek. The magazine interviewed a lot of businessmen and then talked to me. They then produced an article featuring the word ‘betrayal’ all over the front cover arguing that the tycoons had betrayed Hong Kong’s move for democracy and much else besides. Needless to say, I didn’t actually use the word ‘betray’ myself; the trouble is, it focuses the attention of some of my critics on what they know I think even if I say that I didn’t say it. Still, I’ve long known that politics and journalism are not in thrall to the truth fairy.

Monday 13 May

James Tien, who is a not very bright weathervane of a politician and is now also the chairman of the Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce, has written an article denouncing me on the grounds that I have called businessmen in Hong Kong traitors. Anson and I both address the Commonwealth Parliamentary seminar and both say that the people in Hong Kong should speak up for the territory. Anson added that if Hong Kong prizes its autonomy and way of life then its citizens will have to say so; she called on the international community to reassure Hong Kong if things seem to be going wrong after 1997. How could I have put it any better? A reasonable Exco yesterday. Apart from C. H. Tung, people were pretty supportive about my visit to and speeches in the USA. I tried to be firm but emollient, far from easy. I rather gave up on the emollient bit when I saw James Tien and Henry Tang.^fn15 They are shifty and James even says when challenged that he hadn’t actually read the Newsweek article before he signed his own newspaper piece. I made it clear to them that while I would like to end the row, if it’s going to be stoked up they will find me slogging away in the trenches but none of it will do Hong Kong any good. They departed in a cloud of geniality saying how much they want me to come to dinner with a group of their friends. At least if Henry Tang is in charge of the wine, that will be no disappointment. He seems not to travel beyond first-growth clarets. I once served Château Musar, a very well-regarded Lebanese wine, at a dinner that he attended and he was rather sniffy about it. Some people tend to judge wines almost entirely by the price. I also like thinking of the Château gallantly hauling the grapes across Beirut, as the bombs and rockets fall around them, on their way to making their marvellous vintages.

Tuesday 14 May

I’ve had rather a low week as we wait expectantly for Michael Heseltine and his lions’ tour of business leaders to make their way once again across the Middle Kingdom in the general direction of Hong Kong, which Michael will reach on 24 May. I am not feeling very well, which is the result, I think, of the flu that I never really got over and the fact that I am stupidly once again doing the cabbage soup diet. Elspeth persuaded me that it was a quick fix which would please my cardiologists. More cheerfully, Yvonne Hawker has an exhibition of paintings at the Fringe club in Lan Kwai Fong which I opened. We bought a wonderful luminous painting of a yellow plastic bowl sitting on a table with fish tanks behind it. She had several paintings of fish, which made me rather hungry. We were told at dinner that Nellie Fong, who is (to be charitable) rather close to Lu Ping and is a lustrous long-term member of the United Front, has been responsible for organizing much of the quite effective stirring of the row over my American trip and the Newsweek headline. She was herself part of the group from the Better Hong Kong crowd that visited the USA recently flying a lead balloon in their efforts to convince Americans of China’s good intentions. My diet came to a climactic end with bananas and skimmed milk, which tasted wonderfully exotic.

Wednesday 15–Thursday 16 May

My businessmen critics have sent an open letter to John Major expressing ‘profound disappointment’ with my comments about them; that is, the comments which I didn’t actually make. John has fired back a corker of a letter pointing out what I had actually said in the USA while doing such a good job to promote Hong Kong. He added that they should be very grateful to me, which of course is not a sentiment that comes easily to them.

Thursday 23 May

I have eaten my last bowl of soup and consumed my last baked potato for some time. The trade triumph is now approaching. We have waited, like the Ephesians in church a couple of weeks ago, with humility, gentleness and patience. Whatever else happens, Nellie Fong or no Nellie Fong, we shall have an exciting time with the president of the Board of Trade.